If you are looking for a useful way to backdate your WordPress posts, let’s dive into this blog. It will give you a lot of useful information.
Should you backdate your WordPress posts?
By default, WordPress enables you to change the date of any post. You can publish your post with the current date and time or backdate it to a particular time in the past. You can even schedule your posts to be published automatically in the future.
This feature can benefit your website in some situations. In particular, it lets your published content appear on your website with the exact date you want. For example, you would like to write a special Christmas post and plan to publish it by December 25th. However, for some reason, you cannot finish it as planned. Now, you can backdate the post, and anyone looking will probably assume it was posted before Christmas.
On the other hand, backdating can still have negative effects on your website. Even if you change the published date of your posts, search engines still record when they indexed them. Thus, you could write a post today and backdate it, but search engines would still know. As a result, if you are trying to get more traffic to those posts, backdating WordPress posts could be of little value.
In our opinion, the disadvantages of backdating WordPress posts outweigh the advantages, so you should consider it carefully and use this method only when necessary.
How to backdate your WordPress posts?
First of all, you need to open the published post that you want to backdate.
On the post edit page, look at the “Publish” meta box in the right-hand column. You will see a “Publish immediately Edit” option. Let’s click on the Edit link.
After that, you will see options that allow you to change the month, day, year, and time of publication. You can edit it to a particular time in the past or in the future, but try to avoid wacky dates. If you choose a future date and time, the post will be scheduled to be published at that time.
In contrast, if you choose a date and time in the past, your post’s date will be updated and its position in your archive pages will change.
After editing the date, don’t forget to click the “Ok” button.
Then click on the Publish button when you are happy with your content.
Congratulations, now you can easily change post dates in WordPress by yourself. This method is also helpful when you want to publish a post without it appearing on the front page of your site: just set its date earlier than the latest post on your website.
How to display the last updated date in WordPress?
Displaying the last updated date for your WordPress post is often better than showing the publish date, especially for websites with a lot of regularly updated content.
To do that, you need to locate where the post date data is stored in your theme files and insert the following code.
[ht_message mstyle=”info” title=”” show_icon=”” id=””class=”” style=”” ]
Last updated on <time datetime="<?php the_modified_time("Y-m-d"); ?>"><?php the_modified_time("F jS, Y); ?></time>
You need to replace the information in this code with your own information because it is just an example.
Summary
We have just given you a step-by-step guide on how to backdate WordPress posts. Hopefully, this article gave you a lot of useful information. In case you have any questions, don’t be afraid to leave a comment below. You may also want to see our detailed guide on how to schedule posts in WordPress.
Moreover, it is a good chance for you to visit our Free WordPress Themes to explore a wide array of beautiful, modern designs for your site.
