--- title: Should you update or delete old blog posts? description: A practical way to audit old blog posts, decide which ones to rewrite, and retire the rest without breaking links or losing the traffic you have. date: 2026-10-21 updated: 2026-10-22 tags: [seo wednesday, content, wordpress] url: "https://drivenhost.com/blog/update-or-delete-old-posts" author: DrivenHost --- Most of the sites we look after have a drawer full of old blog posts. A handful still bring in steady traffic years later. The rest sit there getting nothing, quietly going out of date, and every so often one of them embarrasses you by ranking for something you no longer sell. SEO Wednesday this week is a cleanup job: working out what to do with the posts you wrote a long time ago. ## Pull the numbers before you touch anything Open Search Console, go to the Performance report, set the date range to the last 12 or 16 months, and export the Pages table. Judging a two-year-old post on 28 days of data tells you very little. Then sort what you exported into rough piles: - **Clicks and impressions.** Leave these alone. The most common self-inflicted SEO wound we see is someone "improving" a page that was already working. - **Impressions but almost no clicks.** The page is being shown and skipped. That is usually a title and description problem rather than a content problem, and we wrote about [fixing titles and descriptions](/blog/titles-descriptions-fix) separately. - **Few impressions.** Google knows the page exists but does not think it answers much. This is your rewrite pile. - **Nothing at all.** No impressions, no links, no internal links pointing at it. Retirement candidate. Check whether the page is indexed before you blame the content. A post that was never indexed is a different fix. ## Decide: keep, rewrite, or retire A post is worth rewriting when the topic still matters to the people who buy from you, and the page already has something to build on (some impressions, a few links, a sensible URL). That existing history is the whole reason to rewrite rather than start fresh. A post is ready to retire when the topic is dead. A promotion that ended in 2019, a service you no longer offer, a "we're exhibiting at X" announcement. No amount of editing makes those useful. Everything else can wait. Ten posts a month gets you through a hundred by next summer. ## Rewriting a post so the update is real Changing the date is not an update. We see this one constantly: a plugin bumps the modified date, the sitemap shows a fresh `lastmod`, the content is identical, and nothing happens in search. Rightly so. What actually makes a difference is less glamorous: Answer the question better than you did the first time. Fix anything that is now wrong. Replace screenshots of interfaces that no longer look like that, including cPanel ones, since the layout has moved around over the years. Cut the paragraphs you wrote to hit a word count. Add the thing a reader would ask next, which is often the part the original post skipped. Keep the same URL. Keep the topic roughly where it was; if you find yourself writing about something genuinely different, that is a new post, not an update. When you are done, check which pages on your site link to it and make sure those links still make sense. Our notes on [internal linking for small sites](/blog/internal-linking-small-sites) cover how we approach that. Google's own [guidance on creating helpful content](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content) is a short read, and it asks the same questions we would. ## Retiring a post without breaking anything Three ways out, in order of preference. Redirect it to the closest genuinely relevant page with a 301. Or take the two or three paragraphs worth keeping, fold them into a better post, and 301 the old URL there. Or, if there is honestly nowhere relevant for a visitor to land, let the URL return 404 or 410 and move on. An honest 404 on a dead page does you no harm. What not to do is redirect a pile of unrelated old posts to your homepage. Search engines tend to treat that as a soft 404, so you get none of the benefit, and a visitor who clicked a link about a 2019 price change lands on your front page with no idea why. One operational note from our side: if you are adding more than a few redirects, keep them all in one place. One block in `.htaccess`, or one plugin, not both. Redirect rules spread across a plugin, a theme function and the server config are how sites end up with loops that are painful to unpick later. [Redirects done right](/blog/redirects-done-right) goes through the mechanics. ## Then leave it alone for a while For the handful of rewrites you care most about, use URL Inspection in Search Console to request indexing once. The rest will be picked up on the normal crawl. Either way, expect weeks rather than days before the numbers mean anything, and compare like for like when you look: this October against last October, not this week against last week. Content cleanup is slow, unexciting work, and it is also one of the few SEO jobs where the effort reliably shows up in the data. If you get partway through and hit something on the hosting side, a redirect that will not behave or a page that still serves an old cached version, [open a ticket](/support) and we will take a look at the server end with you.