A website or blog that has been around for a while has likely published a significant amount of content over time. Depending on the particular niche, this content can be more or less time-sensitive, current, or sensitive to changes. In short, it may be outdated.
Keeping your content fresh, current and relevant is vital to both reputation and credibility and SEO. But sometimes it’s hard to keep all content perfectly up to date. Still, visitors need to know if a piece is now relevant or if some of the information in it has changed. That’s when we might need a WordPress old post notification. Let’s see what it’s all about and how to set it up.
In blogging and web publishing, content corruption. It’s a term used for pieces of content that haven’t been updated in a while and may need some work. Blogs and websites with a lot of content often have a hard time keeping content fresh and up to date. This applies to both time-sensitive content and evergreen content that is always relevant but may still require some factual fixes.
Outdated content can be damaging in a number of ways. Firstly, discredit. You want to establish yourself as a reliable and reliable source of correct, relevant and fresh information rather than outdated and inaccurate content.
Second, Search engines love updated content. They signal to them that you are a valid factor in the online publishing community and therefore place you higher.
Now it’s clear that unless you run a large operation with a large staff and plenty of resources it can be difficult (if not impossible) to keep all your content up to date at all times. For situations where you are aware that a part needs to be updated but are not close to it yet, Viewing old post notifications can help.
An outdated post notice, or alternatively, the date the piece was last updated, lets your visitors know that they should be skeptical of the information in it. It also shows that you care about relevance and are honest about your business.
Displaying the “Last Modified” date instead of the post date is one way of dealing with this, and displaying the “Old Post” notification is another. Let’s see how to set up both.
WordPress stores published data for a post as metadata. Every change you make to a post is saved and stored. If your blog or website shows the date of publication above an article, you may want to replace it with the date it was modified (updated) so that visitors know how new the article is.
But you will need a plugin to do this. especially – WP Last Modified Info. This is a simple and lightweight plugin that automatically adds the “Last Updated” or “Last Modified” tag to your post and can be configured to your liking.
Start by installing and activating the plugin as you normally would. Next, go to: Settings in your left pane menu and click WP Last Modified Info.
The first thing you should do is toggle the switch to show the most recently modified information on your posts.
Don’t forget to save your settings before continuing.
next, below Template LabelYou can choose how you want to display the information format, date format and author.
There aren’t any options to choose from in the date format, as the plugin uses the values you set by default. Settings>Date.
Here you will also find a useful HTML template with dynamic tags available for template tags. If you are not an advanced WordPress user, you can skip this part of the configuration.
Then you can decide whether you want to enable JSON-LD Markup Mode. The plugin is compatible with all major SEO plugins (Yoast, All In One, Rank Math…) and tries to automatically convert the data “published” by these plugins to “last modified”. Don’t worry, this data is displayed dynamically when the post is viewed and does not affect the stored data.
The next section is for setting up email notifications every time someone updates a post.
Following this we have Various settings. Here you can show or hide changed information in the admin bar, set the default admin post order (modified posts go before or after) and the default sort order on the frontend.
Submission Date Time Change or Removal is an important option. Here you can choose to disable the change or removal, change the original post date to the modified one, and hide it from search engines (both on the frontend and from your SEO plugin’s output). Note that this option should be disabled if you are using a schema.
The Tools section includes the option to turn “Disable Update” on or off for all posts. Here you can also export or import the plugin settings for use on another site. Finally, here you will find a button that resets all the settings you have made and restores them to default.
don’t forget to hit Save Changes after every change you make.
Now, if you don’t want to change your post date to “changed” or “updated”, DX Outdated. This plugin adds an option to display a message box that displays outdated content after a certain predetermined time.
Install and activate the plugin from your dashboard and go to: Settings>Not Updated.
The first option is to set the duration value and amount. The default is one year, but we changed it to six months. Here you can also set the message you want displayed with your post.
You can then decide whether you want this to apply to all old posts (those that fall within the time range you set in the previous step). You can also set whether you want the message to be displayed on the backend as well.
The default setting is to apply the message to posts only, but you can set it to apply to other formats as well (your pages, media, products, etc.).
Finally, you can adjust how you want your message to appear. You can specify the position (top or bottom of content; default is top), as well as the color of the message box and text.
If you are familiar with CSS, you can add your custom CSS values here.
don’t forget to hit Save Changes when you’re done setting everything up.
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As we can see, it is as easy as 1-2-3 to inform your visitors about your old content with the help of the right plugins. Today we saw two different ways to indicate that a piece of content is not exactly new. Now it’s up to you to figure out which works best for your website – “Last Modified” or “Old Post” message is displayed. From there, with a little tweaking in the configurations, the plugins will do all the work for you!
