Yoast, the company behind the popular Yoast SEO plugin, announced it had acquired the Duplicate Post plugin earlier today. Along with the acquisition of the project, the company brought on its creator, Enrico Battocchi, as a senior developer. He will continue in a lead role with the future development of the plugin.
Duplicate Post currently has over three million active installations and is translated into 46 languages. Of its 451 reviews, it has almost a near-perfect 429 five-star ratings. Few plugins, especially when they garner such a large user base, can pull off the feat of an average 4.9 user rating. Battocchi has put in over a decade of work into building the community around the plugin.
The plugin does exactly what its name implies. It allows end-users to duplicate posts. “Post” in this sense means any type of content, including pages and post types from other plugins. It also allows users to choose which fields are copied in the duplicated post.
“Lots and lots of people use this, for several workflows,” said Joost de Valk, Chief Product Officer at Yoast. “They use plugins like this to be able to re-publish and have a publishing ‘workflow’ on existing posts, something we intend to make easier. They use this to copy a design made in a page builder like Elementor or Divi, a complex post setup with ACF blocks, or something like that, and just have to alter the content and not restructure the whole thing.”
For a plugin in such a seemingly small niche, many users have found a need for the ability to clone posts. “It surprised me as well that there was this large a group of users for a plugin like this,” said de Valk,” but it’s obviously there.”
It was not immediately apparent how a post cloning plugin would fit into the traditional Yoast brand. The company’s primary focus is on SEO tools. However, de Valk feels like it has a home at Yoast.
“What we want to do is twofold: the first of the workflows I mentioned, republishing content, is often done with SEO at least ‘in mind,’” he said. “We want to make that workflow easier. The second has an SEO ‘risk’: changing a post or page only slightly could lead to duplicate content problems. When we know that a post or page is a duplicate of another post or page, we can verify that it has, in fact, been changed enough, or give feedback to mitigate that potential SEO issue.”
“Yoast is also a key part of the wide WordPress community, supporting it in various ways (from Core development to WordCamp sponsoring),” wrote Battocchi in his own announcement. “I’m excited to join them because I’m confident that Yoast will be a great new home for Duplicate Post, and its users will benefit of all the advantages of an inventive company which can provide quality, support, vision for the future.”
What’s in Store for the Plugin?
Yoast plans to keep Duplicate Post free for the long haul and has no plans for commercial upgrades. This is not an empty promise, assures Battocchi. “One of the conditions for me to join was to be sure that Duplicate Post would stay free: there are no plans to switch to a premium/freemium scheme, and none of its current functionalities will be removed from it,” he said.
The team is remaining tight-lipped about any big features on the horizon. However, the most immediate goal is to improve the plugin’s accessibility.
It almost goes without saying that the team will look into how Yoast SEO and Duplicate Post can work together. “We’ll add some simple integrations between Yoast SEO and Duplicate Post,” said de Valk in the announcement post. “Such as making sure that the user roles that Yoast SEO adds, SEO Editor and SEO Manager, can duplicate posts.”
Beyond that, the company is awaiting feedback from end-users. “We have ideas,” said de Valk, “but we’re also very interested in hearing yours and your readers’ suggestions.”
He has also opened feedback requests on the Advanced WP Facebook group. Thus far, most of the feedback is centered on better integration with page builders and other plugins that build content.
