How to Archive a WordPress Website
If you’re running a WordPress website, you’ll know that it’s very easy to lose track of older posts as time goes by. Whether it’s accidentally scheduled for deletion or because you just plain forgot about it, old content can be absolutely the death of your blog. Luckily, there’s a way to keep all your older posts safe and sound – using a WordPress archiving plugin. Let’s take a look at how to archive a WordPress website.
How to Archive a WordPress Website
Archiving is an important tool for any website or blog owner. Keeping older content accessible means more opportunities for future exploration and engagement. Keeping old website content accessible also helps with SEO – ensuring that your content is easily discoverable by search engines.
There are many reasons why you might want to archive a WordPress website. Maybe you’ve outgrown the medium and want to focus on expanding into other areas of online marketing. Or maybe you’re just ready to settle down and explore a more traditional path of passive income. Whatever your reasons are, the important thing to keep in mind is that you want to keep your content accessible for future generations.
While it’s often tempting to delete old content to make way for new, keeping it online allows you to continue attracting potential customers – even if they’re just one click away from discovering the truth.
To ensure that you’re always keeping your content accessible, why not consider archiving?
A WordPress archiving plugin can help you save all your older posts and pages to a single location – meaning that even if you do lose access to your WordPress dashboard, at least you’ll still have all your content available for future reference.
These plugins also store the date of last modification for each item – meaning that even if you do lose access to your WordPress dashboard, at least you’ll still know when each item was last updated.
Considerate Archiving
With so much content available online, the risk of people discovering your old posts accidentally is very real.
Luckily, there are plugins that can help you be considerate of others when archiving your content. The most basic level of consideration is by default.
When you select to archive a WordPress website, the plugin will immediately start generating a PDF version of all your content. This is particularly useful if you plan on distributing any content that you’ve archived – whether through a printed magazine or even an eBook.
You can also set a cap on how many articles or pages you want to archive – preventing you from uploading hundreds of old posts to your server simply to fill up empty space.
Along with being considerate, why not consider setting an expiration date for all your archived content?
Giving your content a limited time frame helps prevent people from stumbling upon it accidentally when searching for more current content. This way, they’ll discover your older posts and realize how useful they are – but also that it’s out of date.
Make It Easy To Find & Navigate To Your Archived Content
Besides being considerate and proactive about archiving your content, you might also want to make it easy for people to find and navigate to your archived content.
With most WordPress archiving plugins, you’ll find a basic set of menus that allow users to easily access their most recent, and archived content.
If you’d like to make your archived content even more accessible, you can also add an extra layer of navigation with a sitemap.xml file. This file will generate an interactive map of all your archived content – allowing users to easily browse through and find the content that they’re looking for.
Securely Back Up Your Archive
Last but not least – and something we can’t discuss without mentioning GDPR – you must ensure that your archived content is safe and sound.
Giving your content a backup plan is very important, even if you’re not directly affected by GDPR.
While we’re sure that you’ll agree that GDPR is a helpful framework for data privacy and security, it is important to remember that it is not the be all and end all of online security.
Keeping a backup of your content is essential; however, you must also ensure that it is not accessible to anyone else.
Conclusion
Keeping an archive of your content is very important, especially if you’re outgrowing the medium or just want to revisit some older posts.
WordPress archiving is very easy to set up and very convenient when used correctly – ensuring that even if you do lose access to your WordPress dashboard, at least you’ll still have all your content available for future reference.
You might also want to think about the security of your archive – ensuring that no one but you has access to your content.
Be prudent about your content – keep the ones that you feel are valuable or just want to preserve for their historical significance.