Should You Keep or Delete Old Content in WordPress?
Are you wondering how best to manage old posts on your WordPress site?
Over time, some of your content may become outdated, irrelevant, or inaccurate. This can lead to a bad user experience and a lower SEO ranking for your site.
In this article from Ded9’s blog, we will examine the issue of whether it is better to keep or delete old posts on the site.
What is the Problem with Old Content on the Site?
As you grow your website, you may focus on creating new content. However, outdated content can quickly become a problem for increasing WordPress blogs. Left unchecked, it can affect your business, sales, and profits.
Depending on your niche, your content may become irrelevant, inaccurate, or inappropriate over some time. This may result in poor user experience, higher bounce rates, and lower search rankings. It can also damage your credit.
In our guide to content demotion, we explain why some of your older articles may be downgrading. We also show you how to find broken content using an SEO plugin like All in One SEO.
You may also have old articles still ranking but now contain outdated information. There is no easy way to find this content other than systematically reviewing your reports. Then, you can decide whether to keep or delete the old content.
Should you keep or delete old content in WordPress?
Fortunately, you can manage old posts in several ways so your website doesn’t suffer. The best approach will vary from position to post, and it’s usually not a choice between simply keeping or deleting the content.
For example, you may want to retain evergreen content declining in rankings. However, you must also update that content to be up-to-date and accurate to increase your rankings.
On the other hand, deleting old posts that are no longer relevant can improve your site’s user experience and SEO. But to avoid 404 errors, you need to redirect the posts.
For most blogs, a combination of strategies will be the correct answer.
With that said, let’s take a look at the different ways you can deal with outdated content on your WordPress website:
- Schedule regular content updates.
- Promote your old evergreen posts.
- Add old post notifications.
- Delete or archive old posts that you want to remove from your site.
- Redirection of deleted, archived and unpublished posts
- Bonus point of the article: recovery of deleted posts
1. Schedule regular content updates
Whether your old posts contain outdated information, it’s important to update or rewrite them occasionally to keep them fresh.
This is because Google considers the recency of an article when ranking your content. In general, it prioritizes newer posts over older ones.
At Ded9, we update our old content at least every six months. As soon as a post is published, we schedule an update.
We recommend that you schedule regular updates of your website content.
You should update any post details that are now outdated and add new information that was not available when the post was first written.
You can also add internal links to relevant posts you’ve published recently, and you may need to update the keywords used in the article to match current search trends.
Don’t forget to update the images in the post, and you can improve engagement by embedding video content.
We recommend working through our checklist on optimizing your blog posts for SEO when updating or rewriting content. This post even has a section on how to optimize old blog posts.
2. Promote your old evergreen posts
If an old post contains evergreen information that is still accurate, it may be overlooked by hiding further away on your website.
Promoting older related articles allows you to maximize your traffic potential. This allows your visitors to read ancient and evergreen content.
Plus, you can attract new visitors to your site by sharing valuable old blog posts. This way, your best content will always be visible to your WordPress site’s users, helping generate more traffic.
You can schedule regular time to share your old posts on social media, link to them in new articles and roundup posts, or use an automated plugin like Revive Old Posts.
3. Add old post notifications
Once you start scheduling post updates, you can’t update them all at once. So, what to do with old posts until you find the time?
For posts that aren’t as fresh as you’d like but are still accurate, you can add an old post notification at the top of the post. This makes your readers realize they are not reading the latest information on the topic.
Another solution many blogs use is adding “last updated date” instead of the published date. This way, readers can quickly see when you last changed the content.
4. Delete or archive old posts that you want to remove from your site
What if you have content that you no longer wish to display on your WordPress website? Maybe the post is irrelevant, or you’ve decided to take your website in a new direction.
In this case, you can delete or archive the post as you do with your emails.
To delete a post, edit it and click the “Move to trash” button in the right menu. WordPress will send that page to the trash.
By default, WordPress automatically deletes anything in the Recycle Bin after 30 days, so you still have time to change and change your mind.
You must install and activate the LH Archived Post Status plugin to archive a post. Once started, this plugin will add a custom post status called “Archived” to your posts, pages, and custom post types.
You can archive a post or page by editing it. When you click the “Status” drop-down menu, you will see the new position “Archived” status.
Select the “Archive” status and then click the “Update” button at the top of the page.
Your post will be marked as archived and no longer appear on the front end of your site. Your website visitors can no longer see it.
If you want to reuse the content in the future, you can edit it if necessary and then publish it by changing the post status to “Published.”
Whether you delete or archive a post, you should redirect the URL to a related post that is still visible on your website. Otherwise, your users will see a 404 page not found error message when they visit the page.
5. Redirect deleted, archived, and unpublished posts
Once you’ve deleted, archived, or unpublished a position, your visitors will see a 404 Page Not Found error if they try to visit the page by clicking the link or bookmark they saved.
This is a bad user experience and can affect your WordPress SEO, so we recommend sending the user to a different but related page on your website using a 301 redirect.
The All in One SEO (AIOSEO) WordPress plugin is the easiest way to manage and create redirects. It is the best SEO plugin for WordPress, and more than 3 million professionals use it to improve their site’s SEO.
On the All in One SEO » Redirects page, you can enter the “Source URL” of the page you removed and the “Target URL” of the post you want to send your visitors to.
Now make sure the Redirect type is “301 Moved Permanently,” and then click the “Add Redirect” button.
Bonus point of the article: recovery of deleted posts
If you unpublish a base and change your mind, you can republish it.
But you might wonder what to do if you change your mind about a deleted post. Fortunately, you may be able to retrieve it from the Recycle Bin.
WordPress moves deleted items to the trash folder like on your computer. This will remove those items from the website and admin pages, but not immediately and permanently.
After 30 days, WordPress permanently deletes the item from the trash and database. If the page you deleted is still in the garbage, you can restore it.
If you want to restore the page, you need to go to Posts » All Posts (or Pages » All Pages) in your WordPress admin area.
From here, you need to go to the “Trash” tab to see all the posts that have been deleted in the last 30 days.
If the post you want to restore is listed there, hover your mouse over the page title, and you’ll see a “Restore” option.
You can restore it from a backup if it’s not in the trash. For this reason and many others, we recommend setting up regular WordPress backups.
Another set of WordPress tutorials, as well as a set of SEO and optimization tutorials, has been completed. We hope this training is for learning and understanding the topic. Should we keep or delete the old content on the site? , may be helpful for you, dear ones;
