The Archives widget is very famous in WordPress. Even if it must be recognized that it is used less and less. However, it can be very useful on websites and blogs with old content and/or big content. When displayed on a WordPress website, it allows Internet users to browse the archives of their choice.
But, this widget may sometimes no longer work. It will be displayed on a website or blog. But When you make a choice in the drop-down list or click on a link in the list, you’ll be sent to the latest published articles. And not on the chosen month!
So what to do when the WordPress Archives widget is not working or no longer working? let’s solve this now together !
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The WordPress Archives widget bug
There is a common bug with the WordPress Archives widget. You put the widget in your sidebar. You set it up. When you test it by clicking on a month, the web page loads but still displays recent/last articles. Regardless of your choice.
Example of the bug : You are on the blog page of your WordPress site. You click on the month January 2020 in your Archives widget for which you have 4 articles. The page loads but displays your most recent articles. Not those from January 2020. Here is the problem. And it’s not good at all for users and for all your audience.
How to resolve this bug to restore the display of archives by month in the archives widget?
You use the SEO by Yoast plugin, right? Okay! Go to Yoast SEO settings. When you are in the SEO plugin settings menu, go to “Advanced”. Then in: Date archives .
As you can see on the screenshot here, Date archives are disabled. And yes, this is why Archives widget does not work if this is disabled on your WordPress site. So if you want to use Archives widget, you have to turn on this choice:
Indeed, this Yoast SEO setting controls not only the probable display of your archives by date in search engines. Additionally, to “ensure” if you had deactivated Date Archives, it blocks the functionality access to archives. And so your widget!
For the WordPress Archives widget to work, you must turn on the Date archives here in Yoast. Move the button from left to right!
Should I index your Date Archives ?
For my part on all my websites, I disable archives by date (also called Date Archives). Hence the fact that the archives widget will not work if I put it in the sidebar or elsewhere. We can also read in the screenshot below that Yoast SEO does not recommend indexing archives by date. This recommendation is given because this could cause duplicate content. Which means that content would be indexed several times. Which is not useful. We would all like our content to be indexed correctly, but not to be indexed several times. Especially if it can harm the good SEO of the pages of your WordPress website.
If you still want to make the archives available to your audience by date. You can enable the functionality. Use the first button for this. But you can decide with the second button not to index these date archives . To prevent your content from being indexed several times.
A fake bug
You understand now : this bug in the Archives widget is not a real bug 🙂
In our cases, this is another WordPpress plugin that takes over expected functions. Hence the interest in not only installing then activating WP extensions. But take the time to go through them and set up them. And when in doubt, do your research to configure them as you really want them to behave.
Check WordPress permalinks in Settings
In case you’ve transfered content from another site to you new fresh WordPress website, check settings. I mean :
- click on Settings in your WordPress menu
- then click on submenu : Permalinks
- Here, make sure that your permalinks use this : Month and name. Or Day and name.
They both include months in urls. And that’s the way our widget works 🙂
