Why You Should NOT Remove Dates from Your WordPress Blog Posts

I am one of those people who doesn’t read anything before I check the date it was published. News? I check the date first. Lists? I still check the date! Personal bio pages?!! I still want to see when it was written! In my book, a date is sometimes more important than the author. I can usually get by without knowing who the author is, since, after all, you can get a sense of the author after you’ve read a blog post, but to be lost in time can be so frustrating that I might give up reading your blog post entirely.

I find date checking to be especially important if you are reading about a topic that changes rapidly, like technology or investing.

Keeping dates on a blog post can do a number of things. It helps put that blog post in the context of a time-frame, which can make the content itself read better.

Here’s an example, you’re reading a tech blog and you see that the author is in awe of a piece of technology that is, by today’s standards, obsolete! Without a date, you might think they’re poking fun at the technology. As the reader, you might think it is a hoax or April Fool’s!

Instead, when there’s a date, you can take a trip down memory lane and find more appreciation for that blog.

There are other examples where dates are important.

Is that code still useable?

How about a blog that offers code snippets and other tweaks for blogs and websites, and chooses not to display dates?

How would you know if a post is still valid or if that piece of code still works when you can’t see when it was written? Well, you could start reading it, and maybe stumble upon some indicators of when it was written. Maybe you’ll see a code version or something of that sort, and simply do your own search and see when that might have been written.

Or you might even try the code and it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to or it breaks your project, at which point you wonder if you did it incorrectly. You can spend hours scratching your head trying to fix it before you figure out the code is obsolete.

SEO problems

SEO experts (the self-proclaimed ones, with nothing to show for all that expertise!) generally say that dating your posts, especially for types of blogs that do not deal in news, is bad for business. Because of evergreen content!

Let me tell you something: there is no evergreen content, and especially for tech blogs or for blogs that are linked in any way to technology, a date stamp will help users understand something immensely valuable:

It’s not that your content is wrong, it’s that your content is outdated!

By being open about when your content was written your readers don’t grow to be resentful of you or lose faith in your content.

Especially when dealing with a blog that manages content such as WordPress tutorials, tips, tweaks and so on. Because, let’s face it, if you’re looking for a resource that actually works, that can give you valuable results, you want to know that the information is timely.

So, the bottom line is, date stamp your blogs! It’s worth it. Respect the time and intelligence of your readers by letting them know when your content was written.