How to change a squarespace blog post's publication date

Blogging and creating content for your website is rarely a “publish and never touch it again” situation.

It’s quite common to go back to old blog posts that you published a long time ago and update their content, improve the information, make it more current and increase the value to both search engines and visitors.

This is actually something i’ve been doing on my own website, and even though it takes a lot of time and effort to improve all of these previously published blog posts, I can already see some major SEO benefits! We’re talking an increase in website traffic, higher conversion rates, more opt-ins to my newsletter and higher rankings for my desired keywords and keyphrases. Yassss queen!

Once you decide to go back to these blog posts and pump them up with a second life, you probably want to update the blog post’s publication date while you’re at it since this can be an SEO factor.

I’ve already answered the question “Does changing a blog post’s publication date affect SEO?” so if you haven’t already, be sure to read that post for more information and a better understanding of what’s going on in Google’s mind.

But in this post specifically, I’m going to show you exactly how to change/update a Squarespace blog post’s publication date.

Click play to watch the video tutorial below or read on for written instructions!

How to change the date of a published Squarespace blog post

In most cases, you’ll want to change/update the publication date of a blog post that you’ve already published.

Here’s how to do it:

Home Menu > click Pages.
Click the Blog Page containing the post (who’s publication date you want to change)
Hover over the blog post you'd like to change and click Edit.
For Squarespace sites on version 7.1, click the gear icon in the top-right hand corner
Inside the blog post editor, click the date below Published
Select a new date and time from the calendar
Click Save or Apply and then you’ll see the post's new publication date on your Blog Page

Et voila! Easy as pie.

How to change the date of a blog post before publishing

Let’s say you’ve scheduled a draft blog post to go live sometime in the future, but you then decide that you want to change the publication date before you publish the post.

Here’s how to change the date before publishing in Squarespace 7.0:

In the blog post settings, click Draft.
Select Published
Click the current publication date below Published
Select a new date and time
Click Save & Publish

Note: your blog post will only publish after you click Save & Publish, even if you select an earlier publication date or time for the draft.

Here’s how to change the date before publishing in Squarespace 7.1:

In the top-right corner, click the gear icon to open the blog post settings.
Click Draft.
Select Published.
Click the current publication date below Published.
Select a new date and time.
Click Apply.
Hover over Done and click Save.

Note: when you click Apply, the blog post will publish immediately. The post will revert to a draft if you hover over Done and click Discard Changes.

Changing the blog post’s publication date also changes the order in which it appears on a Blog page or in the archives

Something to consider is that any time you change a blog post’s publication date, you will also change the order in which that blog post appears on a Blog Page as well as in the Archives. Squarespace blog posts appear in reverse-chronological order by publication date on both the Blog Page and in the Archive (meaning: newest blog posts displayed first/at the top, oldest ones at the end/bottom).

So let’s say that a blog post was originally published in April 2018 but then you change the blog post’s publication date to February 2020, the blog post will now show up at the top of the blog page along with other posts published in February 2020 AND it will also show up in the archives under the month/year February 2020.

Final Thoughts

It’s super quick and easy to change a Squarespace blog post’s publication date so if you’re going back to old blog posts to update/improve/refresh the content and make it better for SEO, then this is something that you’ll definitely want to consider doing! It will take you literally a few seconds to do but it can have a significant impact on SEO.

Now it’s your turn to tell me, have you ever update a blog post’s publication date? Did you do this after updating an old blog post for SEO reasons? Did you notice how that new blog post publication date then showed up in search results? I’d love to know so leave me a note in the comments below!