Posted by WordPress posts are ordered by the date they were published, in ascending order. This is because at its heart WordPress is a blogging platform, and this is how blogs worked.
Nowadays, WordPress is much more flexible, as shown through tutorials on this site, WordPress is capable of everything from E-Commerce, Video Sites, Membership Sites and Directory Sites, as well as simply an effective platform.
You may have noticed through using WordPress, there isn’t actually an easy way to change the order of posts within WordPress. It’s something that would be a useful feature for ordering E-Commerce items, portfolio items, directory listings as well as simply block posts.
Luckily, as with most things WordPress, there’s workarounds, as well as plugins that can help you achieve this. I’m going to look at two simple ways that you can change the order of your WordPress posts.
You can see how changing the post order can make a difference if you check out my tutorial series Start Selling Online. If you look at this category listing you’ll see that the tutorials are listed in order from 1-10, although the timestamps on these are in reverse. (If you haven’t checked it out it’s a great tutorial that gets you started with WordPress and WooCommerce (with hosting by Ionos / 1&1) to start building your own online store.)
Changing The Post Dates
As I mentioned earlier, WordPress by default publishes posts in Reverse Chronological Order. This means that the latest posts go the top, and older posts to the bottom. You can see this if you go to Dashboard > Posts > All Posts – If you look to the Date column on the left-hand side you’ll see the posts in descending order.
So this is probably the simplest way to change the post order, and the best solution if you’ve only simple changes to make. Here we’re simply going to change the publishing date (or the timestamp) of the post so the order is reflected in how the blog is displayed. It’s simple, hover over the post you want to change and select Quick Edit. You can see here there’s also an option to individually enable Comments or Pings for your article, as well as assigning Tags or Categories to your post.
To change the order of your posts in Quick Edit you simply need to change the data in the Date field, and then hit Update, on the right hand side of the screen.
When you refresh your Post page you will then see that the posts are re-ordered in your dashboard window. This will also be reflected of course on the website itself.
Using Post Types Order Plugin to Reorder WordPress Posts
As with most things WordPress, if there’s a problem that needs solving, somebody will have written a plugin for it! Luckily there’s a great solution for reordering your WordPress posts…
Post Types Order is a plugin developed by Nsp Code and is specifically designed to allow you to easily drag and drop posts within your site to easily reorder them. WordPress shows this plugin as having 500,000+ active installations with overwhelmingly positive feedback.
Installing is simple. Go to Dashboard > Plugins > Add New. Search for Post Type Order, ensure you have the plugin from NspCode and hit Install Now. Once it’s downloaded and installed hit Activate.
The plugin will create a settings page in Dashboard > Settings called Post Type Order. You’ll need to visit that page and simply hit save at the bottom to activate the default settings. You then see that when you visit Posts > All Posts, you’ll see that you have the ability to drag and drop posts to where you want them to be, without editing the timestamp of your blog posts.
Here’s my post list for this blog, with my Start Selling Online tutorials moved to the top of the post list, in tutorial order, not reverse chronological order.
The Benefits of Using Post Types Order vs Changing The Post Date
Google likes fresh content. It likes to provide fresh content to its users. Therefore it could be tempting to redate your content so Google may believe it’s fresh and push you up the search rankings. This is not good practice and is not recommended! Google likes to look after it’s users, and wants its users to trust its search results. If Google thinks you’re trying to manipulate it, it may not trust you and will potentially downgrade your content.
For small scale changes with your content, a couple of date changes will I’m sure not make a difference to how your content is perceived by Google, I’m sure you’re not going to hit any spam filters! For larger changes, if at some point you’re going to rearrange a significant number of posts on your site, then using a plugin such as Post Types Order is essential.
This post from Jennifer Slegg at The SEM Post discusses from a Google perspective the importance of authenticity in your posts Timestamps.
