In the early days of blogs, dates mattered—a lot.

That’s because most blogs were some form of an online journal, where the writer expressed experiences and observations of the day. Or the blogger commented on news items, links found elsewhere on the web, the latest viral video to be shared.

So the standard blog post URL structure followed the date of its publication:blogname.com/year/month/date or some variation thereof. And many blogs featured the publication date prominently in the design, too. The most recent posts showed up at the top of the home page, with date called out graphically as well as in the permalink.

As new content piled on top of old, blogs built up vast archives of posts. To navigate these archives, readers had to search through a catalog of links by year and month. But for the most part, older blog posts just settled down like layers of sediment, quietly passing into bloggy oblivion.

Blogs that should keep their dates

A date-focused format and structure still makes sense for news-centric publications. Newspapers, medical and scientific journals, or site whose content relies heavily on timeliness should still include dates. After all, they provide context to the reader, so they know if it’s a hot-off-the-press article or it’s an older view of a subject before some new discovery surfaced.

Evergreen content? Go dateless

For many lifestyle blogs and publishers, however, dates don’t do much to help you. Yet many blog platforms continue to make a dated post structure the default. Unfortunately, evergreen content that’s labeled with older dates can actually hurt the reader’s experience.

Think about it. When you see a pin or tweet and click through to something that was published two years ago, don’t you feel a little … let down? Maybe not entirely consciously. But somehow you feel like the content might not be fresh, trendy or relevant—even if it’s a totally “evergreen” tutorial, essay or list.

Also, by organizing the content on your site by date, you could be shortchanging oldies but goodies that still deliver tremendous value to readers. Consider giving your all-time most popular posts top billing, because they’ve proven to attract traffic and entertain your audience.

That doesn’t mean you bury the new stuff. I’m simply advocating for a healthy blend of new up-and-coming content and older tried-and-true material. You can rotate and shift priorities, both on your site and in your content marketing, so your blog continues to say fresh, seasonally appropriate and on-trend.

If you have a WordPress blog, here’s how to hide dates from your posts:

1. From your dashboard, click on Settings, then Permalinks.
2. Select the “Post name” setting (e.g. http://www.blogname.com/sample-post/
3. Save changes.

Heads up: Once you change this setting, all of your old posts will switch to the new permalink format—which means any links to those posts will be broken. An easy fix: Add the Redirection plugin to your site and activate it. Then all the old links will automatically get redirected to your new permalinks, easy peasy.

If you’re using SquareSpace:

1. Copy the following snippet: .collection-type-blog article .date {display: none ! important;}
2. Go to Design, then Custom CSS.
3. Paste the snippet into your Custom CSS.
4. Save Changes.

If you’re on Blogger:

1. Log into your Blogger dashboard and click on Layout.
2. Select Edit from the “Blog Posts” widget.
3. Deselect the date box under the “Post Page Options” section.
4. Save Changes.