29 thoughts on “How to remove the dates from your WordPress posts (and should you?)”

  1. Hi Brian,

    Earlier we’ve removed the dates from our WordPress posts, but as we have a lot of time sensitive article/benchmark this was not a good option for us so we added the dates back. Btw. great tutorial as always.

    Reply
    • Hey Tom,
      Ya I think each owner should make up the decision for themselves. In your case it makes sense to probably leave them. Each use case is a little different.

      Reply
  2. I’m torn on this. I’ve seen increased traffic removing dates, but it’s never true that 100% of the content is evergreen and I’ve been annoyed enough clicking through results only to find them 4 years old and no longer applicable to the user.

    I just make sure to refresh most trafficked posts regularly in an approach similar to your ‘last updated on’.

    For some folks, please check your theme options as well. Many themes will also offer the ability to disable dates.

    Reply
    • It’s an interesting thought actually: what if there’d be a plugin, with which you could assign a post as ‘evergreen’, which modifies the behavior of how the dates are displayed?

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  3. I have it setup as follows: I show the date on my frontpage (recent posts), but once the user opens the article, the date is removed. What are your thoughts about that?

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  4. I think whether you date a post or not, should be down to the type of business you are writing for. if I am searching for something that doesn’t change over time, then I think there is no need to have dated the post and it looks stale with an old date on it. Whereas if I am reading a news article or something on web coding, then for sure I need to know what date it was written. Just my thoughts

    Reply
    • Hey Una!
      I definitely agree, you should only be changing this if you have the type content which is frequently updated. News articles would be a great example of where you shouldn’t do this approach.

      Reply
  5. Done. I didn’t know where to add the CSS. I added it to customizer – additional CSS and it worked. Thanks, I read your generate press review which made me buy my first theme.

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    • Great, glad it worked. Yes, I just use the customizer now too since they finally added syntax code editing. No need for third-party plugin anymore.

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  6. Hi, manual removing and wp meta and date remover and other plugins don’t work with urls containing date; dates still are in search result. What to do? I don’t want to change permalinks.

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    • Hey Robert, if you have the date in the URL itself, there is no way to remove this from indexing without changing your permalinks. I would recommend changing permalinks to something shorter as Google prefers short and clean URLs. Just make sure to add 301 redirects for everything.

      Reply
  7. Hi Brian,

    I’m using GeneratePress – I tried your snippet in the snippets plugin you mentioned (thanks, btw) and what I see is this:

    Updated:by Jose
    Last Updated on October 3, 2018

    I’m guessing the ‘Updated by’ and my name are coming from wherever the original pub date line lives.

    Where would you add the code if you weren’t using the snippets plugin? I’m wondering if it’s possible to add it to the source file and comment out the text around the original pub date, without that getting overwritten by a future theme update.

    Thanks for any help Brian, and thanks for being so giving in this awesome blog!
    J

    Reply
  8. Hi Brian,

    my apologies – it works beautifully!
    I was using a plugin to display the last updated date, and left it on!

    Your workaround it fantastic – thank you!
    Jose

    Reply
  9. Hi Brian Jackson,
    Your post still is still showing the original published date in Google search ie Nov 18, 2013, instead of the modified date. Why?

    Reply
    • Hey Imran,
      Great question! So Google will always be the one that decides whether or not to show the “updated date” even if you have the correct code in place. Some of my other posts are showing the newer date just fine. Google is pretty smart now and can tell if content is being regularly updated or is stale.

      Reply
  10. I use elementor, and I cannot find anywhere information on how to remove post dates. The thing is, that our category is a high ranking landing page (once our current site migrates) and the posts there after are all cases (over 120). We can’t have post dates on them. I wish there was a service to do this. Great article though!

    Reply

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