How to Add Old Post Notification on Your WordPress Blog
Do you want to add an old post notification in WordPress? Recently, one of our users asked us how they can automatically warn users of old posts on their website. They had hundreds of old documentation articles, and they feared some of they may not be useful. In this article, we will show you how to add old post notification on your WordPress blog.
Old Posts Notification for WordPress
There are three ways to displaying old post notification in WordPress.
- Automatically show an old post warning for all posts that are X days old
- Manually mark posts as outdated and show a warning
- Display last updated date
Having dealt with this problem ourselves here at WPBeginner, we will mention the pros and cons of each solution.
1. Automatic Outdated Post Message for WordPress
In this solution, you use a plugin to automatically display an outdated post message on all WordPress posts that are older than a specific number of days (let’s say 2 years).
You can do this by installing and activating the Juiz Outdated Post Message plugin. Upon activation, simply visit Settings » Outdated Post Message to configure the plugin.
You can see the setting to choose the number of days after an article should be considered outdated along with the ability to customize the message.
Below the general settings, you will find display settings which allows you to choose post types where you want to display the outdated posts message along with where do you want to position the message.
You can also disable outdated message for selected posts by editing the post and updating the outdated message options box.
Pros and Cons of this Method:
The biggest upside is automation. If you set the number high enough such as 2 years, it’s likely that your content may be outdated specially if you’re in a fast-moving industry like tech.
The downside is that when it comes to content, there is no magic solution that applies to all. There will always be articles that are ever-green such as our shared web hosting article.
So by displaying an outdated message on a perfectly good article, you’re losing visitors.
2. Manual Outdated Post Message for WordPress
Just like the above solution, in this method you display an outdated post message except it’s not automatic. Rather you have to manually mark a post as outdated for the message to be displayed.
You can use a plugin like Old Post Notification. Once activated, there’s a settings area for you to customize your message under Settings » Old Post Notification.
After that, you have the ability to mark each individual post as Old and even write the custom message from the post edit screen.
Pros and Cons of this Method:
The biggest upside is that you can manually select which posts are old and even customize the outdated message.
This is really an ideal solution for most sites. The downside which isn’t really a huge downside is that it isn’t automatic.
Considering the downside of having legitimate posts being marked as outdated with the automatic solution, we’d pick a manual solution any day.
3. Last Updated Dates
This solution is rather different. Instead of showing an outdated post message, you simply show a last updated date of any post.
For a site like WPBeginner, where we are constantly going back and updating articles, it makes perfect sense for us to display last updated date which is a lot different than Published date.
Visitors can see when the post was last updated to determine how relevant that particular article may be.
We talked about this solution in details in our article about why you should not remove dates from blog posts.
This method has the same benefits as option #2. The only difference is that it doesn’t show a big warning message.
That’s all, we hope this article helped you warn users of old posts on your WordPress blog. You may also want to check out our article on how to archive old posts without deleting them and 8 proven methods to promote old posts in WordPress.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Google+.
