How to Add Engaging Archives Section on your WordPress Site

How to Add Archives Section on WordPress Sites

Do you want to make your site engaging and informative with the archives section? Here is a quick tutorial on how to add Archives section on your WordPress site.

Archives are a great way to keep your audience updated on what happened previously on your site. WordPress, by default, provides an Archives widget to display monthly blog post archives. You can either display them in a list or a drop-down menu. A drop-down Archives would be less noticeable and it is not considered user-friendly if you want to make your site engaging.

Displaying your archives either in a long list (monthly) or a drop-down menu and displaying the post counts are the only two options available in the default Archives widget by WordPress. The features are way too limited by default. Your Archives should be responsive, attractive, and engaging; especially websites with a long list of articles should focus on their Archives section more. One of the solutions is adding an archives section on your site. It does not take much space and your archives will be appealing.

So, without any further ado, let’s now have a look at how one can add engaging archives in WordPress.

How to Add the Archives Section on your WordPress Site

For this tutorial, we will be using a simple WordPress plugin, ‘Annual Archive’. The plugin currently holds around 10K+ Active Installs on WordPress.org.  It is quite a popular plugin to display archives in WordPress easily. You can display the archives with either widgets or shortcodes.

Annual Archive Plugin

Adding Archives with Annual Archive Widget

Since mostly the Archives are displayed on the sidebar of a website, we will be adding the Archives section on the sidebar as well. Upon the activation of the plugin, visit Appearance > Widgets. There, you will be able to see the Annual Archive widget ready to be added on your website.

Drag and drop the Annual Archive widget to the sidebar area.

The Annual Widget provides a bunch of amazing archive customization options. First, you can enter a title for your archives section. Then, you have the control to choose your Archive Type. You can go for Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Yearly, Decade, Alpha, or Post by Post.

After that, you can also choose your Archive Post Type from posts, pages, or media. Moreover, you can also go beyond the regular posts/pages/media and select custom post type content to display on your archives section.

You can also choose which Format you want to showcase your Archive in HTML., Option, Link, or Custom.

Apart from all these options, you can also enter Text before Link, Text after Link, and Select Text. Furthermore, you can choose the number of archives you want to display as well.

That is pretty much it. You can save your customization and head over to your site to see the widget in action. Your Archives section will now display elegantly on the sidebar area. Here is a quick preview from my tutorial.

Adding Archives with Annual Archive Shortcode

As we mentioned earlier, you can also add archives with shortcodes. You can use the shortcode method to display your archives in pages and posts. Click here to get the full shortcode documentation. The page displays all the shortcodes you can add to display an elegant Archives page or post.

Here I have created a new page and named it “Weekly Archives”. I have simply pasted the shortcode for my desired Archives look.

Now simply hit the Publish button and see your shortcode in action.

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