How to Remove the Date Stamp in WordPress

by John Casteele
Removing date stamps help WordPress blogs to stay evergreen.

Removing date stamps help WordPress blogs to stay evergreen.

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WordPress allows bloggers to use a variety of themes, styles and plugins to customize their blog to better fit their needs. Bloggers who want to keep their content evergreen or who publish posts as single pages to create individual articles instead of a running blog may dislike the atomatic dating that WordPress adds to each post, however. For those who have WordPress installed on their own server and have administrator access to the WordPress installation, the date feature can be turned off by disabling the code that creates the date.

Step 1

Log in to the WordPress admin area. Open the "Editor" menu from the "Appearance" portion of the administrator dashboard.

Step 2

Open the "page.php" file in the Editor. Highlight the text of the file and copy it by pressing "Ctrl" and "C" on your keyboard; open Notepad or another text editor and paste the file's content into it by pressing "Ctrl" and "V." Save the text file; this copy of the file allows you to correct mistakes if you accidentally mess up the code of your WordPress blog.

Step 3

Use the search function of your blog and locate the line "<td class="clearstyle_calendar">" in page.php. Highlight the line and press the "Delete" key to remove it. Repeat this process for the five lines that follow; they should be "<td class="clearstyle_calendar">", "<div class="entry-meta">", "<?php clearstyle_posted_on();?>", "</div>" and "</td>". Save the file after these lines have been removed.

Step 4

Load your blog in a new browser window and click a blog post title to load the full post as a single page. The date will no longer appear on the single-post page.

Step 5

Return to the admin area and make copies of "single.php" and "loop.php" in the same way you made a copy of "page.php". Deleting the same lines from single.php removes the date from your blog posts while deleting the lines from loop.php removes the date from home page entries. Save the files after deleting the lines.

Step 6

Copy the saved code from your text files and paste it over the altered code in the Editor to restore the date to your posts and WordPress pages.

About the Author

Born in West Virginia, John Casteele now lives in Kentucky. A writer with more than eight years of experience, he has written both articles and poetry for publication in magazines and online. A former nationally-ranked sport fencer, Casteele also spent several years as a fencing coach and trainer.

Photo Credits

  • Jupiterimages/Brand X Pictures/Getty Images