I wanted to share something with you that many wordpress users have probably thought about. By default, most WordPress templates will include the original date of the posting. Normally this will be found right under the title of the post at the top of the page.
Certain themes, such as the WooTheme that I’m using on the SDCS site make it very easy to remove some of this meta data, as it’s called. I have another site that shows this information clearly, but there are times I felt maybe it would be better to remove it. I think there is this prevailing idea that readers may get the impression that old information is somehow outdated or irrelevant if it’s not fresh.
In many cases this is more of a perception problem than one of fact, since a lot of information is sort of timeless. With that said though, a lot of the “timeliness” issue depends on your subject matter. If you have a blog on painting or recipes, the content will have more longevity, compared to a tech site on the latest computers or gadgets. The latter will get outdated pretty quickly.
On most of my websites however I ended up removing the date information, with the main reason being I didn’t want people to think I wasn’t updating a website regularly or that the content was old. It just seemed to outweigh any benefits from the date being visible.
A recent article from WPBeginner provided some new insights into this date or no date issue and I think they make some very valid points. In their case, not showing the date caused more issues, and perhaps less trust, and that’s not a good thing. They found a very good workaround, by modifying a bit of WP code to show the last updated date, rather than simply the original published date.
As always, via your experience, the drawbacks or benefits may vary, but it may be worth testing out to see whether showing the post date, or not revealing that information will work better for you.
