Will My Writing Still Feel Human?

Table of Contents

The All-Published-Posts Dashboard — How to Diagnose Hundreds of Posts on One Screen

In the previous two articles, I explained what the Discover checklist checks and why I left out keyword density.

There is one practical limitation, though: the checklist lives in the editing screen. In other words, you can only see it after opening an individual post.

But what do you do with a site that already has 200 or 500 published posts? Opening them one by one is not realistic.

That is why I built a dashboard for checking all published posts in one place.

Why the Editing-Screen Checklist Alone Is Not Enough

When I built SOHO SEO, I designed these two screens as a pair from the beginning.

The checklist in the editing screen is for “posts you are about to write,” while the dashboard is for “posts you have already written.”

This distinction matters because, by the time most people install a new plugin on a working WordPress site, they already have a substantial body of content.

I kept running into this situation while consulting for different sites.

New posts were being managed with the help of the checklist, but hundreds of older posts were still sitting untouched without featured images, author information, or a properly configured viewport.

No matter how well you build new features, the trust signals for the site as a whole remain weak if you never go back and improve its older content. That is why I decided the dashboard was not an optional extra, but an essential feature.

I Did Not Put Everything on One Screen

When I first designed the dashboard, I faced a tempting idea: show everything on a single screen.

I could have added separate columns for featured-image status, E-E-A-T, clickbait, and viewport configuration, and placed them all in the table.

Instead, I display just one overall score out of 100 in the list. To see the individual criteria, you have to return to the checklist in the editing screen.

This is not about hiding information.

When hundreds of posts are listed on one screen, expanding all five criteria into separate columns makes the table far too wide.

A table wider than the monitor creates both horizontal and vertical scrolling, and in the end, no one really looks at it properly. I decided that the purpose of this screen was not detailed diagnosis, but prioritisation.

Start with the posts that have the lowest scores. To see what is wrong, click a post and open its editing screen. The list view and the detail view have different jobs.

Why I Cache the Scores

There was another performance issue I had to consider. Checking one post is lightweight, but recalculating everything every time becomes expensive when the list grows to 500 or 1,000 posts.

So after calculating each score, I cache it in post meta (_sohose_score).

Instead of recalculating the score every time the dashboard opens, the dashboard displays the cached value whenever one is available.

If the scores for dozens of posts were recalculated every time the page opened, the admin screen itself would slow down and interfere with the site operator’s other work. I did not want that.

At the same time, I added a separate “Recheck” button next to each post.

Why use a manual button instead of automatic updates? There is another technical reason. One of the checklist items, mobile viewport testing, cannot be handled simply by reading a value from the database. The page has to be loaded and its rendered result checked.

That costs more than scanning the page content itself. So I temporarily store the result as a transient and run the check again only when someone clicks “Recheck.”

I think of this as a design that “charges you only when the cost is necessary.” Automatically keeping every post permanently up to date may sound ideal, but in practice, most posts do not change after publication. The cached score is usually enough; you only need to click “Recheck” after changing the theme or when an image breaks.

Why I Added a Category Filter

The dashboard includes a category-selection dropdown.

Why does that matter?

I added it after observing how people actually manage their sites.

Most editors do not approach the task thinking, “I’m going to fix every post on the site.”

Instead, they narrow the scope: “This week, let’s start with this category.”

Older categories in particular—sections that were run for a while and then abandoned years ago—often contain a disproportionate number of low-scoring posts.

When you filter by category, it becomes immediately clear where your efforts will have the greatest impact.

I decided that breaking the work into manageable units like this was more likely to lead to real improvements than simply displaying the entire list at once.

Why Paginate in Groups of 20?

I set it to display 20 posts per page, with page numbers for navigation.

That number was deliberate, too.

If there are too few, you have to keep turning pages, which is cumbersome. If there are too many, the screen becomes overloaded with information, making it harder to identify priorities.

After testing different options several times, I decided that 20 was the right balance. It is enough to scan the whole list with just a scroll or two.

Why Check Editing Permissions

Access to this screen is restricted to users with the edit_others_posts capability.

That may seem like a minor detail, but I consider it important. The dashboard provides an overview of the quality of the site’s content.

It can reveal which posts have low scores and which authors are not consistently following the checklist.

I decided that this was information for editors in chief and site administrators—not something that should be visible to everyone with basic contributor access.

Individual contributors can see the checklist for their own posts in the editing screen, while the site-wide overview is limited to users with the appropriate administrative access.

Are SOHO SEO’s Scores Accurate?

Having someone judge my writing—especially according to a fixed set of criteria—seems, in a way, contrary to what it means to be human.

Humanity is defined by individuality and creativity, by qualities that can go in unexpected directions. That makes it impossible to reduce “human” writing to a score.

Even so, it is possible to make a reasonable assessment of the direction Google is looking for.

This scoring system is based on curiosity and research into what makes writing feel more human than text produced by AI.

That is why the goal here is not to declare that my writing is the best, or the most human.

If anything, the criteria are closer to asking whether a piece feels too bland and impersonal, or whether its predictable narrative might cause readers to mistake it for AI-generated writing.

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