Content management systems are robust administrative platforms, used to build and operate websites ranging from small personal blogs to large corporate online headquarters. One of the most popular content management systems (WordPress) started as a blogging platform, and quickly grew into a comprehensive CMS used around the world.
Today, WordPress is used to manage many kinds of websites including multimedia sites and online shops. It is also still used by many to blog about their everyday lives and current world events.
Why is There a Date by Every Post?
As mentioned before, WordPress is actually a blogging platform. Blogs consist of posts that are organized into categories and are basically online journals. When a new post is published on a blog it is moved to the top of the home page, and every post includes a time/date that the post was published. However, many people do not want the date to show up on their WordPress blog for each post, as this may provide insight to the actual age of the site, and a new site is generally seen as being “unprofessional” in the online industry. This is especially true for site owners that want to create static sites that remain the same and are not changed in structure by the latest posts. The following methods will let you remove the date from your posts and pages.
Date Exclusion Plugin
The date exclusion plugin will automatically remove the parts of your WordPress theme that contain the date, by scanning through the files of the theme and find all instances of specific code snippets. This plugin is very convenient and easy to use, and can be programmed to exclude the date on a post by post basis, or on a site-wide basis. Unfortunately, this plugin will not work for all themes, and some themes may require manual removal of the time and date code snippets.
Removing the Code Snippets Manually
If the above plugin did not work, then you can use the following method to manually remove the time and date code snippets from your theme. You will need to use a program that can search through multiple files in a folder, like PR Grep. Using this program you can find all instances of “the_time” and “the_date.” Once you know which files the code is in, you can go in and remove the snippets from the theme individually. You can also use a Multiple Find and Replace program to replace all instances of these codes with a blank space within your theme folder.
Conclusion
Having the ability to remove the date and time from your post will let you create the illusion that your site is older and more established than it really is. Anyone building a professional business site should consider using these steps to remove the time and date of their site publishing. By leaving the date in tact you are giving your site visitors an open book of your posting activities, and this transparency could lead to a lack of trust and confidence.
