The time is coming around once again, where I'll be spending a few weeks, or months, going through a bunch of articles on my blog to update them. But here's the question: How often should you update older blog posts? I'll share with you my strategy and hopefully, you'll be able to figure out what you need to do for your own blog.
Updating blog posts should be on every blogger's agenda. It's great to be able to write fresh content every time, but sometimes, you really don't have to. I mean, why make more work for yourself?
Work smart, not hard, right?
You might have noticed that I don't publish a blog post as often as I used to here on Magnet4Blogging.
Well, that's partly because I've been so busy juggling and managing my other online businesses: my freelance business, my YouTube channel, my music business. And partly because I've been lazy.
But most of the time, I don't need to rack my brains trying to figure out what new topic to write about next.
At the time of publishing this post, I have around 340 blog posts published on Magnet4Blogging.
It used to be a lot more than that before I began auditing my content and moving a lot of the design-related posts over to my sister site at FVM.
Anyhow, I honestly believe that I have enough BIG articles on various topics related to blogging that still provide a ton of value.
A lot of the posts on my blog are not evergreen, though. I'm actually going to focus more on writing posts that will not need updating much in the future since updating posts takes up a lot of my time.
The answer to the question of how often should you update aging blog posts really depends on several factors -
Let's focus on each one -
What I consider to be evergreen content are posts that stay fresh, relevant, and informative over a long period of time, without needing much updating. These types of posts include -
I consider the following examples not to be evergreen -
So, you have to consider how many evergreen and none-evergreen posts you have?
Once you've created your list of posts, you'll then be able to estimate how long those articles will take you to update over time.
Magnet4Blogging has quite a few product reviews, blogging tech, and blogging tools tutorial posts, promotional posts, and statistics-based articles. These are the kind of posts that I need to spend time keeping up to date, fresh, and relevant.
One of the things you might have noticed on my blog posts if you are a regular reader is the display of when the post was last updated, rather than when the post was first published.
I believe that this is the best tactic to use for any blog that publishes a lot of content that will require updating again in the future. The plugin that I use for this is called WP Last Modified Info. You can find it here.
So now for some real answers...
For my product reviews, i.e. theme, plugins, software, comparison posts - I tend to update these once per year. I usually add the year the review was written or the tutorial was created in the headline.
For facts and stats, again, I try to update these posts every twelve months.
Some of the how-to and tutorial posts depend on what I'm trying to demonstrate. If it's a tutorial post or video using a particular theme, plugin, or software, for example, I update these only when something has changed with the technology.
So, for your own blog, it really depends on how often your posts need to be reviewed, refreshed, updated, and all the rest of it. If you have product reviews, these can be refreshed once per year.
Tech and software tutorials depend on what has changed since your last update.
News, promo, deal articles, again, it depends on whether anything new has come to light since your last post update.
The next question is this - How do you keep your old blog posts fresh and relevant? Check out this post to find out.
So, there you have it. I've shared with you my strategy for updating blog posts, and hopefully, you now have some idea as to how frequently you should be updating your older blog posts. I hope you've found this post valuable.
Here are some articles I recommend checking out -
