How to Make A Clean Archives Page

To keep visitors on your blog and keep them coming back, you must have good content that they can find. They must be able to find it and get past the front page. The search box on your blog does not always show everything you have posted and can limit the number of pages that your visitors see.

The archives link in your sidebar shows a short list or a calendar that takes time to go through one month at a time. That can distract your visitors by making them work for the information they want. There is a better solution though - having all your archived articles on one page with the title and number of comments for each one.

Clicking a heading will show either all the articles for that month, or the entire article that was selected. Your visitors can then read what they want and go back to the list to find more.

SRG Clean Archives is a WordPress plugin that helps build the archives list for you. It is sinfully easy to install and set up. If you know how to upload and activate a plugin, then you can create an archives page. Once the plugin is installed, you go to the settings for the plugin, select your options and write a new page.

That new page has a title such as Archives and one line of code in it:
<!–srg_clean_archives–>

Once you put that line in the page using the HTML view, publish the page and look on your Pages list to see it. Note that you must use the HTML view to enter the code, not the Visual view, or it will not work.

There is a training video at HowToSpoter.com that will give you a visual guide to walk you through this process. There is also a link on the page to download the plugin. Check it out and start getting your previous articles found!