Dec 3, 2013 / Beginner

Driving Traffic to Your Archives

Let’s discover ways to drive traffic to the older content on your site.

Given the ephemeral nature of the internet — from breaking news to memes to reader attention spans — it feels like we, as online publishers, are pushed to keep pace with the web, writing post after post each day.

Most blogs are set up for this kind of schedule, with front pages displaying your latest posts. But while your readers (and search engines) love seeing fresh content on your homepage, we encourage you to promote your archives, too: your best posts, your hidden gems, your timeless content. It’s great to drive traffic to older posts and different parts of your site.

You’ve got handy tools on WordPress.com to promote your older content, including the Archives Widget and the Categories Widget. But let’s look beyond these and discover other ways to drive traffic to your archives.

A custom menu of pages and categories

At Little Grey Box, established travel blogger Phoebe Lee has a custom menu with various tabs of categories and pages, including travel destinations, travel tips, and blogging and branding advice, shown below. Her menu is a “table of contents” of sorts, and is an effective way to organize older content across many topics.

A showcase of your best work

You can create a “Best Of” page and curate a shortlist of your favorite and most popular posts, then add the page to your menu, as I’ve done on my personal website. The Top Posts & Pages Widget may generate a similar list for you, but if you want more control over your selections — and want to display this list on its own page rather than your sidebar — this is a simple way to do it. (For users who like tinkering with shortcodes, consider the Display Posts Shortcode: using various shortcode options, you can fine-tune the posts you want to display on a page, too.)

Custom image widgets

At LifeAbsorbed, Bethany Meyer uses custom Image Widgets in her sidebar to attract and direct readers to various categories, including her writing on hikes, comedy, and Los Angeles. The widgets not only jazz up and visually enhance her site, but drive more traffic to specific areas.

If you’d like to create something similar, read our image widget tutorial for non-designers — this is a great way to direct readers to specific pages and posts, and can enhance your blog’s overall visual look.

Featured post sliders

Some themes have the option to activate a post slider — a slideshow of featured images, often at the top of the homepage, that highlights selected posts. In the Theme Showcase, you can browse themes that support post sliders and the different ways your featured posts can be displayed.

Check out Katie Mayor’s site, Wild Spin of the World. She uses Zuki, which supports a post slider on the front page —  it’s another visual way to call attention to favorite or older posts.

Zuki is a premium theme, but there are free themes that support post sliders, including Dyad 2 and Sketch.

Recurring posts, roundups, and anniversaries

Another way to direct traffic to your archives is by publishing an ongoing series, like the “Straight Outta Fresno” series at Tropics of Meta, a publication on history, current events, and culture. The category is organized under the “Features” menu tab, and is a thematic way to group older posts together.

You can also curate your own content in “best of the month” or “end-of-the-year” posts. Or, if you’re a food or DIY blogger who writes about seasonal recipes or craft projects over various holidays, be sure to promote and link to related older posts you’ve written. These are opportunities to highlight your writing and work in timely, relevant ways.

Some people create editorial calendars to keep regular schedules per week or month, while others write annual posts, too. Expat and nomadic bloggers pen “travelversary” posts that mark another year of living abroad or traveling the world; in these kinds of posts, bloggers revisit older “travelversary” posts and look back on what they’ve accomplished and experienced.

Not an expat or traveler? You can draft a similar post, no matter your niche, and then call attention to related posts from your archives.

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  4. I have done reconnect posts before, promoting related posts together. Recently I have discovered how to use shortcodes to create quick loading and easy to read lists of posts, sorted by categories. It has made my archive much easier to view at a glance.

    Also, I am trying to see if adding a random feature is a good way to drive traffic to older content 🙂

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  5. if I may ask a question here.. does traffic increase as you blog more and have more posts? i am blogging anonymously, so I dont share anything to any other social media whatsoever, and I only recently shifted to wordpress from blogger. I was on blogger for a month and I was getting much more traffic when I was there. Being a newbie in the blogosphere, I’d really like some advice on how to attract people to my blog without actually promoting it using my real identity..

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    1. Okay, way too early for me t obe dispensing advice that I got last night, but to answer our question, yes. Traffic increases with each blog post. Another thing that helps is interacting with people on their blogs and other forums. This is also how you may generate more followers.
      Hope this helps. All the best 🙂

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    2. I set up a twitter account under the name of my blog. I don’t have many followers, but if you tag your tweets smartly (which I am still learning to do, as I do not even have a personal twitter account), this will still get the traffic in. My post on Rufus Wainwright got nearly 20 times the average views, because somebody with a very large number of followers retweeted my original tweet about it. So, anonymity is definitely no obstacle for social media.

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      1. that’s genius! I was thinking of a separate facebook page as well later on, maybe after at least a few months blogging. and i’ll add twitter to the list. And yeah, I don’t have a personal twitter account either. I really don’t know what I’d say with so little characters! that’s why i blog..duh.

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    3. Posting on your blog is just one step — readers won’t be able to find you if you blog in a bubble. You don’t have to reveal your identity at all — but you can do some things to help drive people to your posts: be sure to tag your posts so they can be found in the Reader, where many users look for new posts to read and blogs to follow.

      https://wordpress.com/support/posts/tags/

      Metalheadfairy’s comment about interacting on others’s blogs is key — follow sites and writing you’re genuinely interested in to try and build a network.

      We’ve written about growth and traffic here — do check out other posts:

      https://wordpress.com/dailypost/category/traffic-growth/

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  10. Thanks for the great ideas! I didnt realize how useful categorizing can be..I will def try these. A lot to learn and improve since im new here and just getting the hang of blogging.

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  11. I am new and so naive and probably have done some wrong things on my blog. But I am determined to learn doing things right. I believe this will help me some day.

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  12. I am liking that Idea that butterfly mind has done, however how can you list posts in that menu by year, there is nothing obvious under the options?

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