If you are here, it is because you want to know more about a historical widget of WordPress, namely the Archives widget. This somewhat outdated widget allows website visitors to have access to the list of all the months in which articles were published in the past on a WordPress website or WordPress blog.
This Archives widget can be useful in a drop-down menu format for a website. Where the content is very old. Because the Internet user who wishes to browse archives can then select a month of the year of their choice and discover the content offered at the selected time.
Let’s discover the Archives widget in detail 🙂
Sommaire
The WordPress Archives widget
This is one of the oldest WordPress widgets. It is present by default on all fresh installations of the CMS. So to have this widget, no need to add and activate a WordPress plugin.
The Archives widget via the old widget interface
You will find it here if you use Classic Widgets (old display of widgets before the arrival of Blocks):
And if you activate the Archives widget in your WordPress sidebar, you will see this by default:
You can give it a title and choose between the list of links (months listed from top to bottom by year) or the drop-down menu. You will have the following if you select the view from the drop-down menu:
As for the list of months by year with the WordPress Archives Widget, we have this :
Be careful though if you use list view. Because if your WordPress website has a lot of content over months and months, the list will be very long. This will not be very visually pleasing for your audience. Also, displaying the drop-down menu is recommended to have a lightdiscreet widget. That does not take up too much space in height. This leaves the visitors free to scroll through it and choose the archive they wish to browse.
-> Note that in the archive list view, only the months in which articles were published are displayed. If for example you published an article in January 2023 and one in October 2023, then you will only see January 2023 and October 2023 in the list. Not the months in between. Because the query would be empty for the months concerned.
The Archives widget via WordPress blocks
If you are not using the old widget interface and you are using WordPress Gutenberg blocks, then all you have to do is click on the + icon and type the beginning of the word “Archives” to see the widget. Then you can add the Archives block as follows in the capture:
The WordPress Archives Widget on Mobile
On a smartphone or tablet, the widget is natively designed to adapt via a majority of WordPress themes, very similar to what it does on desktop/office:
It can be noted that its width is often greater than the show of a month in the list, even if the number of articles per month is included. But this is not visually shocking. Since the width of the widget adapts to the width of the screen. In the example above, the capture is taken on a blog so the WordPress theme is Flatsome on an iPhone 12 phone.
What will the Archives widget display?
The Archives widget will display the layout that your theme includes for the “Archives” view. Most themes include this view. Even the oldest ones. Among the most recent, you can even customize the layout of the archive pages, depending on the functionalities offered. It basically depends on your WordPress theme.
Concerning the content displayed by the month selected via the Archives widget, you will simply have the list of articles published during the month concerned. If you have 10 articles published in October 2012 and the Internet user clicks on this month, he will then have the list of the 10 articles published over the chosen monthly period.
In Brief and to summarize on the WordPress Archives Widget
What you need to know and to remember about the WordPress Archives Widget :
Basic functionality : The Archives widget lets you display archive links of monthly publications in a sidebar. These archives help visitors find older content on your site.
Customization : There are two main customization options for this WP native widget:
- You can choose to display the list of archives as a drop-down menu.
- You can view the number of posts for each month via a list view of links
In both cases, you are free to display (in parentheses) the number of articles (numerical display) posted per month.
Finally, this widget tends to be ignored for the simple reason that it does not give the impression of being very useful. Or even less essential. As the design of websites leans towards an “eco-design” of which one of the approaches is to go to the essential, many start from the principle that this access to archives is precisely not essential. It should therefore not be surprising if in the future, the Archives widget were to be deprecated and removed from the native WordPress installation.
Customizing the functionality or design of the Archives widget
Unless your WordPress theme includes visual customization options for this widget or if it offers you an extended archives widget (different from the native widget discussed here), you will need to:
- Through development to change the functions of the native widget
- Using CSS to change colors and fonts
You now know almost everything about the native WordPress Archives Widget.
Archive widget bug
This widget is minimalist so the number of known bugs is reduced. However, you may encounter what is not really a bug. I invite you to read this article if your Archives widget does not display the expected archives.
