Do you have any questions about how to best manage outdated posts in WordPress?
Some of your content may eventually become inaccurate, out-of-date, or irrelevant. A negative user experience and a decline in your site’s SEO rankings may result from this.
We’ll talk about whether it’s better to keep or delete old posts in WordPress in this article.
What Is the Problem With Old Content in WordPress?
You may choose to concentrate on producing fresh content as your website expands. However, on expanding WordPress blogs, outdated content can quickly become a problem. If you ignore it, it might have an impact on your company’s sales and profits.
Depending on your niche, your content may eventually become out-of-date, incorrect, or inappropriate. A negative user experience, a higher bounce rate, and lower search rankings may result from this. It might damage your credibility as well.
We explain why some of your older articles are losing rankings in our guide to content decay. We also demonstrate how to use an SEO plugin like All in One SEO to locate stale content.
It’s also possible that you have old articles that are still popular but contain out-of-date information. Other than conducting a thorough review of all of your articles, there is no simple way to locate this content. After that, you can choose whether to keep or delete the previous content.
Should You Keep or Delete Old Content in WordPress? (7 Scenarios)
Fortunately, there are several approaches you can take to deal with outdated posts so that your website doesn’t suffer. Each post will require a different strategy, so there won’t always be a simple choice between keeping or deleting the content.
You might want to keep evergreen content, for instance, if its rankings are declining. To improve rankings, you must also make sure that the content is current and accurate.
On the other hand, removing outdated posts from your site can enhance user experience and SEO. But in order to prevent 404 errors, you will also need to redirect the posts.
The best approach for the majority of blogs will be a mix of tactics.
Following that, let’s look at some different approaches you can use to deal with outdated content on your WordPress website:
1. Schedule Regular Content Updates
2. Promote Your Old Evergreen Posts
3. Add Old Post Notifications
4. Unpublish Posts While Waiting to Rewrite Them
5. Delete or Archive Old Posts You Want to Remove From Your Site
6. Redirect Deleted, Archived, and Unpublished Posts
7. Bonus: Recover Deleted Posts
1. Schedule Regular Content Updates
Whether or not your older posts contain out-of-date information, it’s still important to occasionally update or rewrite them to keep them current.
That’s because when ranking your content, Google takes the article’s freshness into account. Newer posts generally take precedence over older posts.
WPBeginner updates its archived content at least once every six months. In fact, we schedule an update as soon as a post is published.
We advise setting up recurring content updates on your own website.
You will need to add any new information that has become available since the post was first written and update any details that are currently out-of-date.
The article’s keywords may need to be updated to reflect current search trends, and you can also include internal links to recently published, pertinent posts.
Remember to update the post’s images as well, and embedding video content will increase engagement.
When updating or rewriting content, we advise that you go through our checklist on how to optimise your blog posts for SEO. Even a section on how to optimise older blog posts is included in this article.
2. Promote Your Old Evergreen Posts
As a post is buried deeper on your website, it may be missed if it contains evergreen information that is still true.
You can increase the amount of traffic to your website by promoting older, pertinent articles. It provides readers with the opportunity to read dated and timeless content.
Additionally, by sharing previous insightful blog posts, you can draw in more visitors to your website. In this way, visitors to your WordPress website can always see your best content, which helps increase traffic.
Use an automated plugin like Revive Old Posts, schedule regular time in your schedule to share your old posts on social media, or link to them in your new articles and roundup posts.
Details for these and other tried-and-true techniques can be found in our guide on how to promote older WordPress posts.
A post on how to automatically share your previous WordPress posts is also available on our site.
3. Add Old Post Notifications
You won’t be able to update every post at once once you start scheduling post updates. So, until you have the time, what should you do with the older posts?
You can add an old post notification to the top of posts if they are still accurate but not as recent as you would like. Your readers will be alerted by this to the fact that they are not reading the most recent information on the subject.
A different solution that many blogs employ is to merely substitute the “Last updated date” for the “Publishing date.” In this way, readers can easily see when you last changed the content.
See our tutorial on how to add an old post notification to your WordPress blog for more details.
4. Unpublish Posts While Waiting to Rewrite Them
You can unpublish a post if it now contains outdated information that you don’t want readers to see until you have the chance to update it.
Visitors to your website will no longer be able to see the post, but it will still be available for editing in your dashboard. You can publish the post once it has been updated.
You must first edit a post before you can unpublish it. At the top of the page, you should then click the “Switch to draught” button. A popup will appear asking you to confirm your desire to unpublish the post.
Some website owners choose to password-protect the content or make it accessible to members only as an alternative to de-publishing an article. In our tutorial on how to unpublish a WordPress page, we provide comprehensive instructions for each of these approaches.
You should carefully consider this because deleting a live post from your site may result in broken links and have an impact on your WordPress SEO.
To maintain your SEO rankings, you can temporarily redirect the URL to another pertinent page. In the section below this one titled “Redirect Deleted, Archived, and Unpublished Posts,” we demonstrate how to do this.
5. Delete or Archive Old Posts You Want to Remove From Your Site
What if you no longer want to display content on your WordPress website? The article may no longer be relevant, or you may have changed your mind about the direction your website should go in.
If so, you have the option of deleting the post or archiving it similarly to how you do with emails.
Simply edit the post and select the “Move to trash” option from the right-hand menu to delete it. That page will be deleted by WordPress.
You still have time to change your mind because WordPress by default deletes anything in the trash after 30 days.
Later in this article, we demonstrate how to retrieve deleted posts from the trash.
You must install and activate the LH Archived Post Status plugin in order to archive a post. Once activated, the plugin gives all of your posts, pages, and custom post types the ‘Archived’ custom post status.
A single post or page can be archived by editing it. The new ‘Archived’ post status will be visible when you select ‘Status’ from the dropdown menu.
Just click the “Update” button at the top of the screen after selecting the “Archive” status.
As soon as your post is archived, it will no longer be visible on the front end of your website. It won’t be visible to visitors to your website anymore.
You can edit the content if necessary and then publish it by setting the post status back to “Published” if you intend to use it again in the future.
More information is available in our guide on how to archive posts in WordPress without deleting them.
You should change the URL to a pertinent post that is still available on your website, regardless of whether you archive or delete the post. If not, your users will encounter a 404 error when attempting to access the page.
Details are in the section after that.
6. Redirect Deleted, Archived, and Unpublished Posts
A 404 ‘page not found’ error will appear to your visitors if they attempt to access a post that has been deleted, archived, or unpublished using a link or bookmark they have saved.
We advise you use a 301 redirect to send the user to a different but related page on your website because this offers a poor user experience and may affect your WordPress SEO.
The All in One SEO (AIOSEO) WordPress plugin is the easiest way to create and manage redirects. Over 3 million experts use it as the best SEO plugin for WordPress to increase the SEO of their websites.
You can enter the ‘Source URL’ of the page you deleted and the ‘Target URL’ of the post you want to direct your visitors to on the All in One SEO » Redirects page.
7. Bonus: Recover Deleted Posts
You can easily republish a post if you unpublished it and then changed your mind.
However, you might be wondering what to do in the event that you change your mind about a deleted post. Fortunately, you might be able to find it in the trash.
WordPress places deleted items in a trash folder, just like your computer. These items are no longer visible on your website or in your admin screens, but they are not immediately permanently deleted.
WordPress will permanently remove the item from the trash and database after 30 days. You can go ahead and restore the page if it’s still there in the trash after being deleted.
You must navigate to Posts » All Posts in your WordPress admin area (or Pages » All Pages if you want to restore a page).
To view every post that has been deleted in the previous 30 days, you must now navigate to the “Trash” tab.
If the post you want to restore is among those, all you have to do is hover your mouse pointer over the page title to reveal the ‘Restore’ option.
You could possibly restore it from a backup if it is not still in the trash. We advise setting up regular WordPress backups because of this and a number of other factors.
In our guide on how to recover and restore deleted pages in WordPress, you will find comprehensive instructions on each of these techniques.
With any luck, this tutorial has helped you decide whether to keep or delete outdated WordPress content. You might also want to check out our guide on how to write a great blog post or our expert-selected list of the top WordPress plugins and tools for content marketing.
