8 Proven Methods to Promote Old Posts in WordPress

Are you looking for ways to increase your website traffic?

One of the easiest and smartest methods to get more pageviews is to promote your old evergreen articles.

In this article, we will show you some of the best ways to repurpose and promote old posts in WordPress.

Why Is It Important to Promote Old Posts?

You see most people write a blog post, share it once or twice, and then leave it to die on their blog’s archive page. With more new content you create, your old posts get buried even deeper on your website.

Why let all your time, money, and efforts go to waste?

Promoting older relevant articles allow you to maximize your traffic potential. It gives your visitors the chance to read old and evergreen content.

Plus, you get to attract new visitors to your site by sharing old valuable blog posts. This way, your best content always stays visible to users on your WordPress site and they help generate more traffic.

That said, let’s look at some proven methods to promote old posts in WordPress.

1. Regularly Share Your Old Posts on Social Media

Most of your social media updates are seen by a fraction of your followers. Mainly because there is so much noise and not everyone is online at the same time.

That’s why it is recommended to share at various different times of the day. The Revive Old Post plugin automatically shares your old posts on social media networks like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

It spreads out your updates for different times allowing you to maximize your exposure. Plus, you can choose how old the post should be and whether the plugin should share it more than once.

For detailed instructions see our guide on how to automatically share your old WordPress posts.

2. Showcase Related Posts on Your Blog

When you visit popular blogs like TechCrunch, Mashable, or even WPBeginner, you will notice that there is related content next to or below each article.

If a user has scrolled down to read your entire article, then they are engaged. Using a related posts plugin, you can provide them an opportunity to explore more of your website.

You can easily showcase your old content in this area and get people to visit them. This will help you keep visitors on your website and also boost engagement.

3. Display Your Popular Posts

It’s true that 20% of your website content gets 80% of your traffic. Some articles are simply more popular than others.

Why not get more traffic to them? You can start showcasing your most popular content with a few simple clicks. People coming to your website are more likely to read what many other users have already found interesting.

To get started, you can use MonsterInsights. It’s the best WordPress analytics plugin that offers a popular posts feature. You can show your evergreen content within blog posts, in the sidebar, or at the end of a blog post.

The plugin offers pre-built templates and different customization options. Plus, you can choose how the popular posts are displayed on your website. For instance, you can show popular posts based on views, social shares, or curate your own list.

Here are more great popular posts plugins for WordPress that you can use.

4. Create Better 404 Pages

Most WordPress themes come with a default 404 page template. A 404 page is displayed when a page that the user is looking for cannot be found.

You can use this opportunity to showcase the most important content of your website, and keep that visitor engaged. You can also add a search form on the page, so that users can locate the content they were looking for.

To create a custom 404 page, we recommend using SeedProd. It’s the best landing page builder for WordPress that comes with a drag and drop builder. You create a stunning 404 error page within minutes without writing code.

For more detailed instructions, please see our guide on how to improve your 404 page template in WordPress.

5. Better WordPress Search

Next, you can provide a better search experience for users on your website. The default search feature in WordPress is fairly limited and does not always show the best results.

At WPBeginner, you’ll notice that even with the search feature, we’ve listed our evergreen content, so users can quickly find them. You can do that same and place your valuable old posts to get more traffic.

To provide a better search experience, there are two common approaches. Both of these solutions will help improve your WordPress search.

The first one is to use Google Custom Search form to replace the WordPress search. The other method is to use a search plugin like SearchWP.

Using SearchWP, you get options to assign weights to elements like post title, content, slug, and excerpt to bring up more relevant results for users.

6. Custom Archive Pages

Creating a custom archive page is one of the best way to highlight your old but still useful content.

You can show the most popular articles, most commented posts, recent posts, and so on. You can even display all your post categories/tags, add compact archives, and include a search form.

This will help people not only in finding content, but will also help them understand what your blog is about. You can even add an email sign up form on the page and get people to subscribe to your email list.

On WPBeginner archives pages, we’ve showcased our best articles so our users can easily find them. You’ll see that the archive is organized based on date, categories, and also our handpicked guide.

7. Interlink Old Articles

Building internal links is one of the most important WordPress SEO strategies.

It’s helpful to the user when you link to your old posts whenever it is relevant. People browse the web by clicking from one link to another. This is why it’s important to make sure that there are plenty of your own links in your blog posts for them to click on.

Even search engines use internal links to find new content on your website and rank them on search results.

If you want to improve your internal links, then we highly recommend using All in One SEO (AIOSEO). It’s one of the best SEO plugins for WordPress and offers a Link Assistant feature.

Using the Link Assistant, you can get a detailed report about each link. It helps identify pages that have no internal links and also provides new internal linking opportunities. You can use the plugin to link to your old content from relevant pages and increase pageviews.

Check out our guide on WordPress SEO tips for beginners for some more SEO advice.

8. Link Old Articles in Comments

When answering user comments on your own blog, you should try to use links to point them to other articles on your own website.

It’s not something you should force, rather, it’s important to keep it in the back of your mind, and you will be surprised by how many opportunities will come up.

This builds trust and increases your pageviews. This link you add is going to stay there and any future visitors with the same question will continue to click on that link.

Bonus: Create Roundup Posts

Creating roundup posts is another great way to promote your older articles. Roundup posts are basically a collection of helpful content on a particular topic or industry.

For example, you can create a roundup post of your most popular recipes of the year, the best products you’ve reviewed, or your best advice for small businesses.

Here is a simple roundup post called the ultimate Coronvirus small business guide that we created at WPBeginner. It includes links to our best tutorials and resources to help businesses adapt to remote working.

If you’re looking for an easier way to create beautiful looking roundup posts, we recommend the WP Tasty Roundups plugin.

WP Tasty Roundups is the best WordPress list plugin on the market. Simply type one or two keywords into the built-in search bar, and it will automatically pull images, titles, descriptions, and links from relevant posts into your roundup post.

Even though it was designed with food blogs in mind, the plugin can be used for any blogging niche or industry.

We hope this article helped you find some new ways to promote old posts on your WordPress site. You may also want to see our guide on 40 useful tools to manage and grow your WordPress blog, and our comparison of the best domain registrar for your next domain.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.