What are date archives in WordPress?

Date archives are pages that show all the posts you made in a specific month and year. This allows users to browse content by chronological order.

For example, if your website has date archives enabled, you might see URLs like:

• example.com/2025/ – this shows all posts from 2025.
• Or example.com/2025/03/05/ – this shows all posts from 5 March 2025.

Why should you disable date archives if your permalinks don’t contain dates?

Date archives are mainly useful for news sites or blogs where the publication date matters. For example, a news site would benefit from date-based archives, as it’s crucial to know when something was published.

But for websites where the publication date doesn’t affect the content’s relevance, date archives add no real value. For example, a recipe post about baking a cake doesn’t need one. Whether it was published in 2001 or 2025 doesn’t change the recipe. 

In addition to being unnecessary for many sites, date archives can cause SEO problems. They group posts by date instead of topic, which makes it harder for search engines to understand context. On top of that, date archives can create a lot of extra URLs on your site, which search engines then have to index. Having more pages to index and not having them add value is not good for your SEO.

Why should you not disable date archives?

If you do have the date of an article in its permalink, you have permalinks like this: example.com/2025/03/05/this-one-awesome-post/. Search engines will often automatically “cut off” after each slash. So they will try to crawl, in order:

• example.com/2025/03/05/this-one-awesome-post/
• example.com/2025/03/05/
• example.com/2025/03/
• example.com/2025/

How can you disable date archives?

Go to Progress Planner and complete Ravi’s Recommendation in your site’s backend. Or you can follow these steps:

Why is this a Ravi’s Recommendation?

Ravi’s Recommendations are here to keep your site running smoothly and make every page count. Date archives don’t add much value for most sites and can even hurt your SEO. Turning them off keeps things clean, focused, and valuable.