Update WordPress Post Publish Date each time it is viewed!

To change Post published date each time it is viewed, we can use the the_post action hook that gets fired every time a post is set up in the global $post variable.

Here’s an example code snippet that you can add to your theme’s functions.php file or a custom plugin:

function wpxss_update_post_timestamp_on_view() {
  if (is_single()) { // only update for single post pages
    $post_id = get_the_ID();
    $current_time = current_time('mysql');
    $post_data = array(
      'ID' => $post_id,
      'post_modified' => $current_time,
      'post_modified_gmt' => get_gmt_from_date($current_time),
    );
    wp_update_post($post_data);
  }
}

add_action('the_post', 'wpxss_update_post_timestamp_on_view');

Changing the post timestamp each time a post is viewed will affect the post’s ordering in the blog archive pages and will cause the recently viewed posts to always be shown on the top/front page.