How to Remove Date from WordPress Posts

In different blogs, you will see the date in blog posts to show the date when the blog post was published. It lets people know about the freshness of the blog post. Google also uses the date of the blog post to show in search results. It also affects the CTR in search engines. You can see the snapshot below. You can see that few results are showing date, but few results are not showing the date. This is because those pages do not have a posted date or update date.

Take an example of a search query “Best SEO Plugins” and see the results below. I will prefer clicking ShoutMeLoud and WPbeginners over the Elegantthemes page. Even if the ranking of the Elegantthemes page would be higher, I will still prefer ShoutMeLoud and WPbeginners because these articles were posted recently. Recent articles come with updated content, the latest tools, and the newest methods.

Nowadays, visitors prefer the latest articles so that hiding dates will get more visitors to your post. Google also prefers showing fresh results in SERP. After Google Panda update, it is important to have fresh and updated content on websites. T

So, few bloggers prefer removing dates from the blog post. There may be some reasons why you want to remove the date from WordPress posts. It’s easy to hide the date from the WordPress theme.

Ways to Remove Date from WordPress Posts

There are mainly two methods to hide dates from the post:

1. By using plugin
2. By editing theme

In this post, I am adding two ways: Plugin and manual. You can select any way to remove the date from WordPress posts.

Hide dates with WordPress Plugin

This is the easiest way to remove dates from posts. There are many WordPress plugins to remove the date from WordPress posts. These plugins let you remove dates from homepage, posts, pages and category pages. Few plugins offer good options. WP Old Post Date Remover lets you remove dates only from old posts. WP Meta and Date remover and WP Author, Date and Meta Remove are nice plugins to remove dates from WordPress posts.

Read: How to Install a WordPress Plugin

Manual Way by editing theme

If you do not want to install a new plugin to remove dates from posts, edit the theme and remove the function from pages which prints date. To do this, go to Appearance -> Editor and then choose the page you want to edit.

Note: Take backup of your theme before editing the code.

Go to code pages and find the code:

<?php the_date(); ?>

Or this:

<?php the_time(); ?>

These functions may have some additional parameters in the code. For example:

<?php the_time(‘F jS, Y’) ?>

These are the most common files where you will find this function

• index.php or home.php
• single.php
• page.php
• archive.php
• category.php

Try any of the given methods for removing date time from the post. Comment below if there is any problem in implementation.

Remove date from Google search results but not from posts

If you do not want to remove the date from posts but also do not want Google to list the date in SERP for your blog posts, you try delisting dates. Date Exclusion SEO is the same plugin which does an excellent job. If you do not want Google to list the dates of your posts, you can try this post. It turns off date information after a specified number of dates. You can also set it to stop date information from showing Google immediately.

Should you remove dates from posts

It is the topic of much discussion. It depends on the kind of blog you are publishing. If you own a news blog, I recommend you not to remove the date from your blog posts. The date is an important thing for the news blog. It lets people know that the news is old. But for simple tutorial blogs, you can remove dates from posts. If you are removing dates, I recommend you to keep updating your old posts to keep content fresh with the latest results.

Do you think that removing the date is fine? Share your views on this with us via comments.