WordPress text to speech plugin for French: what it installs, what it leaves alone
The exact list of what the WeDispatch plugin writes into your WordPress when you activate it: a few settings, one fingerprint per article, not a single line in your theme, and no data about your readers.
Before you install a plugin on a live site, there is one honest question to ask: what is it actually going to write into my WordPress, and what will it leave behind for me to clean up if I remove it? For a plugin that turns your articles into audio, the answer matters twice over, because it touches publishing. Here is the precise list of what the WeDispatch plugin puts into your install, with nothing rounded off.
What it writes, setting by setting
The plugin keeps its general settings in the WordPress options, the place meant for exactly that. You will find your service key (the one that links the site to your WeDispatch account), the player position (before the article, after it, or nowhere if you place it yourself), the access mode (open to everyone or reserved for your subscribers), and the voice catalogue, cached so it is not fetched on every screen. These are site settings, not content: a handful of readable lines, living where WordPress expects its options.
Voice routing adds two targeted settings. A voice can be pinned per category, stored on the category itself; a voice can be pinned per author, stored on the user profile. That is what lets the Sport section not sound like the obituaries, and a columnist have their own voice, without ever touching the text of their articles.
What it writes on each article
On a piece of content that has audio, the plugin stores a small handful of facts, and not one more. It records the identifier of the matching article on the service side, a fingerprint of the text (so it can tell whether the text has changed since the last generation), and, if you set them at article level, a mode and a voice specific to that content. That is all. The fingerprint is exactly what lets it avoid regenerating audio for a comma fix: as long as the text has not moved, the audio online keeps being served, and the article is only flagged for regeneration when its text has genuinely changed.
What the plugin does not write into the article is worth saying too. It does not modify the body of your content. The editor block and the [wedispatch] shortcode carve nothing into the saved text: they place a marker read at display time, and the audio identifier is looked up at display, never frozen at save. A regenerated article gets a new identifier on the service side, and a marker that had memorised the old one would point at audio that no longer exists. That technical detail is what makes the mechanism safe, and we spell it out in our piece on the player that inserts itself without touching your theme.
What it writes nowhere: your readers' data
This is the point that reassures publishers most. The plugin stores no personal data about your visitors. The "Listen next" list depends on the article on screen, never on who is listening. When you reserve audio for subscribers, your site attests to a status ("subscriber"), never to an identity, and no data about the reader leaves your server. So there is no listening log to purge, no listener profile piling up in your database: there never was one.
What it installs on the visitor side, and how
The audio player is not a tag hastily injected into your page. It goes through WordPress's official script queue, in the footer and deferred, exactly like any other well-behaved script. In practice that means your caching plugins and your host's performance settings handle it like everything else, instead of tripping over it. The player itself is served by WeDispatch, which manages its own caching: the plugin does not freeze a version of the player into your site.
Why this restraint is a choice, not a gap
You might think a plugin that writes little does little. It is the opposite. The heavy work (reading the text, building the audio, keeping the voice catalogue, producing the transcript) happens on the service side, not in your database. Your WordPress carries only what it needs to know which audio goes with which article and which voice. That is what makes the plugin light to install, clean to remove, and easy to audit. If you want to see everything this choice opens up on the features side, the WordPress page lays it out, and our article on what French quality means for a voice tool explains why we would rather write little, but say exactly what.
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