Keeping your website up-to-date

As many of you may know, I am not just a copywriter.

Copywriting is my main thing because I love to write and always have done, but I also design websites for small businesses, charities and churches.

When I was learning about web design, somebody said something which I’ve never forgotten.

It was on an online forum and was in answer to the question “Can you do that with WordPress?”

(For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, WordPress is a system for building websites. It has two versions, wordpress.org and wordpress.com; the .org version is the one web designers use and requires users to find their own hosting and their own domain name. The .com version, by contrast, is free to use as long as you don’t mind having .wordpress.com at the end of your domain name, e.g. andrewgreenhalgh.wordpress.com)

Anyway, I can’t remember what the person asking the question wanted to do, but it’s irrelevant; what is relevant is the answer, which was “you can do anything with WordPress”.

It’s stuck with me ever since because at the time I couldn’t do much with WordPress. I found it very hard but stuck at it because:

1. I don’t like to give up
2. I don’t like to give up
3. I knew I’d get there eventually.

And I did. I’m still learning now but I’m much more adept at using WordPress to build websites than I was back in those days.

I’ve also found that you can indeed do anything with WordPress. There’s a reason that nearly 50% of the world’s sites are built using it.

Recently I discovered a whole new thing that it can do. Something that’s super-easy to manage and would make a huge difference to so many small business websites.

It’s basically this: You can tell WordPress to un-publish your posts once they are out of date.

(Another quick explanation: Posts are pages and updates you can add to your site for any reason; they are often used to advertise events which are coming up or to chronicle events which have happened).

Posts are great, because they keep your site fresh and full of new content, which Google loves. That’s why I’m forever telling people that blogs are a great idea if you want to boost your Google ranking.

However, I’ve genuinely lost count of the number of sites I’ve visited which have included posts that are months or years out of date.

Posts that say things like “Here’s what you can expect at our upcoming summer festival beginning on June 26 2016”.?

I’m sorry, but it looks TERRIBLE.

So telling WordPress to un-publish them once they’re out of date is so helpful. And so easy to do.

If you manage your own website and use WordPress, and you think this could be useful to you, here’s how to do it.

1. Go into your WordPress dashboard
2. Hover over “Plug-ins” and click “Add new”
3. Search for “PublishPress Future” and then click “Install” followed by “Activate”
4. Every time you post from now on, you will be able to tell WordPress when you want it to be unpublished and what you want to happen to the post when it’s been unpublished.

If you don’t manage your own website and you’d like some help, you know where I am.

If your issue isn’t un-publishing old content but adding new stuff, and you’d like some advice or help, let me know.