Date and time is an important component of WordPress. Dates are sure to be used in your project, whether you run a blog or a more traditional website.
Many of us look for and read fresh content in order to always stay on topic on issues of interest. It is very important that your site supports this trend and is configured accordingly.
Outdated content can easily turn off your audience, especially those people who are looking for up-to-date information; while offering visitors up-to-date information regarding future events always attracts increased attention.
In this article, we will learn some ways to work with date and time in WordPress. We will cover different aspects: showing visitors that the content is fresh, displaying upcoming events, displaying a countdown timer to an important event, automatic deletion old content, etc.
Let's see how all this can be implemented in WordPress.
Display the date the record was last updated
If you regularly update the content of your posts, then you should definitely consider displaying the date. latest update for an entry instead of its publication date.
Usage default settings to display the publication date of posts in WordPress can lead to a decrease in the number of visitors, and may also affect the bounce rate.
If your visitors are looking for the freshest and most relevant content, and your posts show the publication date instead of the last updated date, then visitors can simply leave your site.
Moreover, search engines, such as Google, often give priority to the most recent content when displaying search results. Therefore, publishing the last updated date of your content helps to improve the SEO performance of the site, which also helps to rank more successfully in search results.
Since search engines display this date in their search results, some potential visitors hunting for fresh content may simply miss your site in the SERPs. If you display the original publication date of the content, your potential visitors have no way of knowing when the content was updated. This means that even if your posts and pages rank highly in the SERPs, you may still be missing out on some visitors.
Fortunately, there are several different ways deal with this problem, including customizing your theme files and installing a free plugin. Thus, if you want to implement this on your site, read the article further. We'll show you how to display the date a story was last updated instead of the date it was originally published.
Editing Theme Files to Display the Date the Post Was Last Updated
This method involves updating your WordPress theme to display the date the post was last updated. The update date will be displayed when you click the Update button. This means that your visitors will see a post date that matches the time the content was last updated.
It is important to say that this modification can be done in different ways depending on your WordPress theme being used. We will use the Divi theme in our guide.
Before we make changes to the theme files, let's take a picture of how this theme displays the original publication date in general:
After we make the changes, the date will look like this (now it is the date the record was last updated):
If you want your site to display the date like this, all you need to do is edit one line of code. Before we get started, I highly recommend that you create a child theme. This will allow you to save any changes that will disappear if you update the theme.
We will be editing the functions.php file. This file is located in the root folder of your theme. To make changes to this file, you can download it from the server using an FTP client, make changes through an editor such as Notepad++, and then re-upload the file to the server.
Or you can edit the file directly through the console. This option is simpler, but more dangerous. If you make a mistake, you can break your site.
Whichever option suits you best, be sure to back up your functions.php file.
If you want to edit the file through the console, go to the Theme Editor section. It's in the Appearance menu.
Then, from the list of files on the right, select Theme Functions (functions.php):
The file should open in an editor window. Now press Ctrl + F to open the search tool in the browser and look for the following line:
$postinfo_meta .= get_the_time(wp_unslash($date_format));
Change it to:
$postinfo_meta .= get_the_modified_date(wp_unslash($date_format));
After you do this, save the file. Now try to update the post and view it in the frontend of your site. The date the post was last saved should now be displayed instead of the post date. This also affects the record archives page.
As mentioned above, this example works in the Divi theme. If you're using a different theme, you'll need to contact the theme's vendor to find out exactly how to implement this effect.
Using a plugin to display the date last change records
If you don't want to edit your WordPress theme files, you can go the other way and install a plugin that will allow you to display the date the posts were last updated. The plugin will allow you to display the date the post was updated instead of the date it was published.
The plugin you need for this is WP Last Modified. After activating the plugin on the site, the date the post or page was updated will be displayed in your content.
Using the plugin settings, you can choose the position of the time output and the date format. You can add some text to accompany the date, such as "last updated:".
Now, depending on which settings you have chosen, the date the post was last updated will be displayed to your visitors:
If your content is date-independent, you can go further and remove the post date from posts altogether.
Removing the publication date from posts and pages
If you're using Elegant Themes products like Divi, you can easily disable publication date on posts with an option in the ePanel.
To do this, simply go to the console and select the Theme Options section. Then go to Layout Settings in ePanel. In the Single Post Layout tab, click the Date icon to turn it off. Then save your changes.
As a result, the publication date of individual entries will disappear.
However, the date of publication will be displayed on pages with lists of entries - for example, on the page of archives.
If you want to remove the date here too, go back to the ePanel, go to the General Settings tab, then click the Date icon again to make it gray. Then save your changes.
Now your visitors will no longer see the publication date in the archives.
If you are using a different theme then you will need the WP Date Remover plugin which will allow you to remove the post date. Testing the plugin has shown that it does not work with all themes, so you will need to test it in your theme.
Show publication date only for recently published posts
If you want to display the post date only for the most recent posts, then you can use the WP Old Post Date Remover plugin. The plugin allows you to set a time period after which the publication date will no longer be displayed.
Again, the plugin does not work with all themes. However, if you post details about your theme, then the developer will help you find a solution to the problem on the forum.
Reset the publication date to the current time
Another useful plugin for those who frequently update content is the Date/Time Now Button . This tool adds a new button to the post editor that allows you to change the publication date of a post to the current date.
Clicking on the edit button below current date publications will display a new button. After you update the post with the new date, this information will be published on the front end of your site.
Your visitors will now think that this is the original publication date of the post. This helps if your content appeals to those who are looking for the latest information. Using the Date/Time Now Button Plugin − good alternative changing your theme to display the last updated date of each entry.
If you want to display your latest updated posts in the sidebar, you can use the following plugin: Recently updated posts widget .
Create content with an expiration date
Another interesting way to work with date and time in WordPress is to create scheduled content that is scheduled for a specific time. Typically, such content is available only for certain periods of time, after which it is automatically archived and becomes inaccessible to visitors.
Some examples of using this approach are limited offers, where you offer a discount on your products or services for a certain period of time, forecasts, announcements regarding future events. Since such content is no longer relevant after the event has passed, you can hide it from the site using special scheduling tools.
Whether you want to restrict access to the entire post or just part of it, there are two plugins you can always use. We'll take a look at both plugins to show you how to create blog content that automatically deletes itself after a certain amount of time.
Post Expirator
Post Expirator is a free plugin that allows you to set automatic expiration for posts and pages after a certain date. Once the plugin is activated on your site, you will see new panel added to the post and page editor screens. In this panel, you can set the expiration date for the entry.
When setting an expiration date for records, you can choose what happens to the record after that. The options are: the status of the entry will be changed to draft, the entry will become private, or the entry will simply be deleted in the trash. You can also move an entry to another category after its expiration date.
If a visitor tries to access an expired post, they will see a 404 error page. It's time to create a useful 404 page for your site. This will keep you from losing visitors who are trying to get an expired page.
Through the plugin settings page, you can set a default expiration date for all new entries. You can also automatically add the expiration time and date to the post content. As a result, your visitors will know exactly when a post or page will no longer be available.
scheduled content
If you want only certain sections of a post or page to expire, then the Scheduled Content plugin comes in handy. With this plugin, you can wrap a shortcode in the content that should disappear from the page after a certain date.
The shortcode options allow you to hide and display content according to your preferences. You can only show content after a certain date, or hide it once a certain date has been reached.
The Post Expirator and Scheduled Content plugins can be used in conjunction on the same site. As a result, you will be able to adjust the visibility of your content.
Countdown timer output
If you are launching a product or service or planning an event, you can add a countdown timer to WordPress.
The free WordPress Countdown plugin, as well as its paid version, is the tool that will allow you to easily display a countdown timer on your site. The plugin adds a handy button to the post editor to add a timer to the content, as well as a widget that displays timers in the sidebar.
While the free plugin doesn't have a great design, it's very easy to set up. Upgrading to the premium version for $13 gives you access to a wide range of timer designs.
Displaying a list of dates for upcoming events
Listing upcoming events is another fun way to handle dates in WordPress. If you want to display any list of dates, you can use the following handy tools.
The first tool is the Upcoming Events Lists plugin. This plugin adds a new Event post type that allows you to enter information about each event. Events can have a start and end date, as well as a location. You can set a title, description and thumbnail for each event.
A similar plugin is Very Simple Event List . It works almost the same, but it includes a shortcode to display all the events on your site in separate entry.
Thanks to these two plugins, your visitors will be able to quickly view all upcoming events either in the sidebar or in a separate post on your site.
Dating is the establishment of the time of writing, publication or publication of a work. Dating is one of the most important processes of textological preparation, since only knowledge of the time of creation of works allows us to reconstruct in the publication the sequence of development of the writer's work, to recreate the full picture of the formation of his literary heritage, views and forms of their expression.
In the full sense, to date a work means to establish all (initial, intermediate, final) stages of its creation. The process of creativity finds its expression in the writing of the text. The previous stages - the manifestation and formation of a general idea, specific images, individual phrases or lines, as a rule, are not fixed and cannot be accurately dated. They can be reflected in the commentary in the form of hypotheses, editorial assumptions, explicit or implicit analogies.
Dating should be as accurate as possible. But writing a work is an uneven process. It can be started and stopped, then resumed again and completed after a number of years. An author can write several works at the same time.
The author's dating can be erroneous, especially when the date is put backdating. The date of recording in someone's album may also be the cause of the error. In addition, an inaccurate date can also be a kind of literary device. The dating of the works included in the cycles according to the time of publication of the completed cycle or the end of the writer's work on it also leads to errors.
The complexity of the task under consideration is reflected in the system of conventional signs accompanying dates in textologically prepared publications. Author's date, for example, is understood in textual criticism as part of the text and is therefore simply reproduced underneath it.
If exact dating is not possible and one has to confine oneself to certain chronological limits within “not earlier” or “later”, then the date is accompanied by the text in Latin: “terminusanteguem” or “terminuspostguem”.
date denoting the time first publication, is placed in straight brackets [..], and dubious completed with a "?".
Dates separated by a dash (1876-1879) indicate the period of writing the work; separated by commas (1876, 1879) are placed under the work written in several stages.
Indirect data for dating are extracted from references to historical events and biographical circumstances, chronological calculations and references to the "present time", from indications of certain persons as living or dead, whose dates of birth and death are known, from correlations with other works, from indications of the dates of the celebration of transitional holidays (for example, coincidence with the Sunday of any day of the month), from the data of the language and spelling, if the monument can be dated only within a large period of time. A dating feature can be one or another official terminology, the time of which is known, a “fashion” for a particular word. Dating signs can also be mentions of the names of saints, the time of canonization of which is known. In the works of modern times, the date of the first publication is significant.
When dating this or that work, one must bear in mind that one solid argument is worth any number of unfounded ones.
Each work is characterized by three main dates: start date over the work end date this work and date of first publication. In other cases, a long time passes between the first two dates, and during this period there may be quite important dates: the date of the greatest creative upsurge, the date of finding a decisive turn in the plot, the date of the complete abandonment of the original plan and the return to work from a different position etc. In other cases, a significant period of time lies between the date of completion of the work and the date of publication, and in it are the dates of the author’s repeated attempts to publish the work, the dates of censorship bans, etc. However, all these, although very important, are private moments common problem dating, in which these three dates: the beginning and end of the work and the first publication are the most important.
D date of completion of work above the text (for works subsequently published by the author) is the date of the last white manuscript. Even if after that, in proofreading or in later reprints, the author worked a lot and purposefully on the text, that is, the creative process, in essence, continued. The very decision of the author to publish the work indicates that he has finished it. And the end date is production of a white (censored) manuscript.
These two dates determine the time of creation of the work, it is dated by them during publication, they are guided in determining the place of the work in the general chronology of creativity, and hence its place in the collected works of the writer.
Date of first publication. It should be borne in mind that literary creativity is a phenomenon of social order: the writer writes not for himself, but for readers. If the work is not published, it remains a fact of the writer's personal biography and has no public outcry. Therefore, it is important not only when the author wrote it, but also when it became public domain.
It could be date of lifetime or posthumous publication. It is important that this be the date of the first publication, and it should always be indicated in the commentary, even in those rare cases when it turns out to be insignificant in principle, since the work was widely known in the lists long before the first publication.
There are many examples in the practice of textual criticism when the date of creation of a work remains unknown, and it is dated according to the first publication. In this case, the date of publication takes on special significance as the only reliable date.
When it is impossible to install direct date, applied relative date, indicating the month or year of writing: "February 1861", "1848".
To date works written over a long period of time, when the boundaries of this period are known, they use broad date: "April-June 1862", "1862-1870".
Finally, for dating works that exist in two editions, or those whose beginning and end of creation are separated by a large break in work, it is used double date: "1834, 1842", "1835, 1839-1842" (in the latter case, the double date is combined).
In this article, we'll walk you through how to remove author and post date in WordPress. You can remove the author and date by installing a special plugin, or by editing the theme template code. It is recommended to remove the author of the publication for security reasons, since the author is the login to the administrative panel. V standard themes The WordPress post date doesn't look pretty, which is why many bloggers want to remove it.
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To remove the author and date manually in WordPress, you need to have at least minimal programming knowledge. Besides, in WordPress themes date and author are output via different files which makes it difficult to find desired file to make edits.
The WP Meta and date remover plugin works automatically and does not require any settings. It prescribes the display: none; command in the editor files responsible for displaying the author and date, which visually hides the entire meta-data block.
To install the plugin, go to the WordPress admin panel ⇒ Plugins ⇒ Add New and type in WP Meta and date remover in the search form. Then click install and activate. Everything, the installation is complete. 
After installing and activating the plugin, the author and publication date are automatically removed from all articles on the site.
How to remove the author and publication date manually. Our task is to remove wordpress template a function that is responsible for displaying the author, date, and other meta-data. By default, this function looks like this:
The meta data output function may look different, again depending on the topic. For example, it can be the_author() function or some other function where the inscription "entry_meta" is present.
Be sure to make a copy before editing files in the editor! If you delete some piece of code by mistake, the site may stop loading. And instead of just removing unnecessary lines on the site, you will get problems accessing it. Be careful. Not sure, use the plugin.
Where can you find this feature? Depending on the theme, metadata output functions can be found in the following files:
- php (Main page);
- php (Entry page);
- php (Categories);
- php (User page);
- php (post content)
- php (Archive posts).
Each article published by us on a site made on WordPress has a set of standard details, which are the authorship of the post and the date of publication. In this lesson, we will learn how to remove the publication date, a link to the author, or the name of the author himself. The theme is important because it helps to avoid duplication of pages and content, which will greatly help us in search promotion.
Editing the display of the date and removing the link to the author of the article are site optimization processes, the more you make such changes, the more exhaust you will get in the end.
Article navigation:
Why is it bad to have a link to the author of the publication?
First, let's find out why we need it and whether we need it at all. Link to the author of the article it can be useful when there are many authors, but when we are the sole owner and author of the articles, then it not only does not benefit, but also harms our site.
Imagine the situation, which by the way is very common for newbies when working with WordPress, on our blog there are 100 articles by the same author. And of course, all 100 articles have their own page with unique content. What happens when we follow the link to the author of the article? We will open the information available about him and ... all his articles in the form of announcements. It turns out that we have 100 unique posts and one author page that duplicates all our pages and their text.
From the point of view of search robots, this will be considered copying the content on the pages of the site, which will cause the search engine to distrust your texts, since they really do not like the same text. Your articles may completely fall out of their index, which we absolutely do not need.
How to remove the link to the author of the article and the publication date in WordPress?
All the procedures below can also be viewed in video lesson on this topic:
Our WordPress sites are formed according to the template we have chosen. we studied in another lesson. Our pages are formed "on the fly" and consist of small parts of the program code. How can we find the area of interest to us for its further change?
First, let's open our page with the publication. Then we hover over the element of interest to us and see its code.
Depending on which browser you are using, the source of the page will open for you to view and highlighted in the place we were looking for.
So, let's take everything in order:
- The main block which contains the title of the article, date, author and a link to his articles.
- The div class="entry-meta" is exactly the layer we are interested in at this stage.
- Span class="author vcard" is also a block element more low level where our link is located.
- The link itself.
Having found out the names of the classes of the code blocks we need, we proceed to next step.
Removing the link to the author of the article and the publication date WordPress
In order to remove author's link, open the editor of our theme with, which we analyzed earlier. Better yet, download the index.php and content.php file from our hosting so that we can restore our theme if necessary.
We open the index.php file from the editor and look for the divs we need, if we didn’t find any, open the content.php file and find them there. It all depends on how the theme developers set it up.
Files can be named differently, so you need to know how to find what you need, go to the editor, press the key combination Ctrl + F and enter the name you are looking for in the search.
After we have found the block class we need, we analyze the entry inside it.
When we have found the div we are interested in, in our case it is div class="entry-meta" in which our date and the author of the article are placed, we need to decide what we specifically want. If we want to be completely remove the date and author when publishing then we just delete the code fragment highlighted in the square, save our file and forget about this problem.
There is also an alternative, more, which is written in a separate article. In case of problems with the search, I recommend trying the search through the editor.
How can we see our date and author outputs php function generate_posted_on() which we should find in another file, in my case it is template-tags.php in yours it may be another file and you will have to iterate through all the files in search of the function description, in the same way as we looked for the div class.
Found? Well done, now we are interested in the function itself. If we want to delete the publication date, then we delete the fragment highlighted at number one, if the date does not interest us, then we go to the second fragment and analyze the code.
If you're good with code then you can change the function itself, but this is highly discouraged.
Frequently asked Questions:
Should I completely remove the post date and author on a WordPress blog?
The answer is unequivocal, NO. The thing is that the date and the author of the article are involved in the formation of the page structure. In other words, by completely removing the date and the author, you will lose two necessary elements of data structuring, which are so necessary for your site. These are not words from the air, search engines monitor the presence of this data and warn you about the need for their presence.
Why remove the author link in WordPress?
By removing the link, you "kill" several birds with one stone at once. Firstly, you delete a page you don’t need, which will definitely create duplicate content, and secondly, you lose unnecessary weight transfer from one page to a completely unnecessary author’s page.
That's all I wanted to tell in this, if you have any questions, write, we will definitely help.