Blogger vs WordPress Blog

There are times you will decide that a blog post should be updated. It may be as simple as a couple of small changes, or it may be a bigger update. In either case, it's good to do it.

Why Should You Republish Your WordPress Blog Posts?

Let's hit up the why first because your motives matter.

There are two really good reasons to do this.

When people are searching for a solution, the last thing you want is for them to find your post—and your blog— for the very first time and discover that it has outdated information.

Google likes updated content if it's done right.

Did a mention that there is a third reason?

With a little extra work, you are not only helping your readers and the search engines, but you will in turn have a new post.

An Example of a Post I Am Going to Republish

I do this on the blog here for the very reasons I have mentioned. Now I'm not talking here about finding a way to save yourself some time and energy by not having to create new content. Because should be done just to older posts, not something you did six months ago.

I'll show you an example of one of my posts that I'm going republish. When I do a search for how to set up variable products in WooCommerce, you will see that one of my posts ranks pretty high on that. In fact, according to my Google Analytics,  it attracts pretty good traffic.

But I want to update this post for two reasons:

As you can see, this older post is about 2.5 years old.

Since recent updates of WooCommerce have been released since then, some changes have been made in how you set these up.

Both good reasons in my eyes.

How to Republish Your WordPress Post without Causing Any Problems

You will want to open the old post and make your changes. Again, if you are doing very slight modifications, you will simply update the post. But as I mentioned, there isa distinct benefit to republishing it as brand new content.

Now you will want to:

Click on the edit date.

Choose a new date and time for posting (this needs to be after the current day and time).

Click schedule.

If you want, you can also change the status back to draft, but it's best to get it scheduled so it's not offline for very long especially, if it's a high-ranking link.

Now, two more things to be careful about.

Your Permalink

Don't change this, especially if your page is already ranking in the search engines. Not even with a redirect.

And if you are using Yoast SEO, again, I highly recommend not changing any of your meta data down there. Now I have done some minor tweaks but if at all possible, I figure part of my high ranking is due to the content here, as is, and it's better left untouched in most cases.

Comments

The last piece , which wasn't mentioned in the video was the comments section. Your best bet will be to delete those, for a couple of reasons:

Comments dated before the post date will not only look weird, but will confuse your readers.

Your readers may also be confused if they read through the comments and something is referred to in the post that is no longer in it.

Depending on what you need to do to update a post, it may be take you 15-20 minutes, or a lot longer. In any case, update the small tweaks and republish. In the end, it will be good for everyone.

Source: How to Republish Your WordPress Blog Posts—and Why You Should