Do dates in WordPress post URLs hurt SEO?

What a date in the URL actually does

With the Day and name or Month and name structures under Settings → Permalinks, WordPress fills %year%, %monthnum% and %day% from the post's publish date. That has two consequences that matter more than any ranking theory.

The address announces the age of the post. A searcher choosing between /2019/06/12/wordpress-backups/ and /wordpress-backups/ can see that one is years old before reading a word, even if you rewrote it last month. For news that is a feature. For guides it is a tax on every result you show.

The address depends on a field you can edit. Change the publish date of a post, for instance to republish a refreshed article at the top of the blog, and its URL changes too. The old one would break if core did nothing.

The redirect core adds when a date changes

Core does do something. Each time a published post's date moves to a different day, WordPress saves the previous date in a hidden _wp_old_date field. When a request later ends in a 404 and contains a post slug, core looks for a post that once had that date and sends a 301 to its current address. It is the same mechanism that rescues changed slugs.

The limits are worth knowing:

• It covers posts and other non-hierarchical post types that are published. Pages do not use dates in URLs, so they are not involved.
• It only runs after the request has already failed as a 404, so a second post published at the old date and slug would win instead.
• It does not help when you change the permalink structure itself. That is a different operation, covered below.

It is a safety net, not a plan. If republishing with a new date is part of your routine, date-free URLs remove the problem entirely.

Why many sites have dates without choosing them

During installation WordPress tests whether pretty permalinks work on the server, and the first structure it tries is /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/. On most hosts that test passes, so a fresh site starts with day-and-name URLs unless someone changes it. Network (multisite) installs default to the same structure.

The best moment to change this is before the first post is published: pick Post name on the Permalinks screen and nothing needs redirecting. Our new site setup guide includes it in the first ten minutes for that reason.

Should an existing site remove the dates?

Sometimes. Removing dates from an established site changes every post URL at once, and core does not create redirects for a structure change. You have to add them, usually as one pattern rule on the server or in a redirect manager. Done properly the move is safe; done without redirects it turns every indexed post into a 404.

A reasonable test:

• Mostly evergreen content, hundreds of posts, traffic flat or falling on older articles: worth doing once, carefully. Follow changing permalinks without losing SEO and build the rule with the redirect rule generator.
• News, changelogs, event write-ups, anything where the date is the point: keep the dates. They are accurate and useful.
• A large site that ranks well as it is: the gain is cosmetic and the move carries risk. Leave it.

After any switch, resubmit the sitemap and watch the Page indexing report for a few weeks. The old addresses should move to "Page with redirect" and the new ones should be indexed in their place.