As your WordPress blog ages, your archives increase month by month, and begin stretching down your sidebar. A lot of people then remove them, which I find frustrating as a reader, as when I discover a new blog I like to have an easy way to read back through their old posts.

If you’d like to clean up your sidebar, but maintain some archives for your readers to explore, then simply put your archives on their own page. Although there are several plugins that can achieve this, the simplest and quickest way is to go to ‘Write’ and choose ‘Write Page’.

Title the page with anything you want, although ‘Archives’ is the obvious choice, but do not write anything in the content box. Over on the right of the page , below ‘Page Parent’ is a dropdown box headed ‘Page Template’ as shown below:

Select archives, hit publish and that’s it. As you can see from my Archives page, they are arranged by month and category, and also have a handy search box.

Your theme must have an archives.php file for this to work, if you haven’t got one you should be able to copy the one from the WordPress default theme over and it should do the job. You can of course then customise it further.

Don’t forget to remove your old archive list from your sidebar!