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Archives

Archive pages let visitors browse your posts by time period — by year, month, or ISO week, depending on configuration. They're the static-site alternative to traditional pagination ("page 2 of 47") and a useful way to surface older content that would otherwise scroll off the home page.

The flexweg-archives plugin generates them automatically. This page covers the visitor experience; for configuration see the flexweg-archives plugin reference.

What visitors see​

/archives/​

The index page — a chronological list of every period (year, month, week as configured) with post counts:

2026
├── March (5)
├── February (8)
└── January (3)

2025
├── December (12)
├── November (10)
└── October (7)
…

Each link goes to the period page.

/archives/2026/​

A year page — every online post created in 2026, with optional month-grouping headers:

March 2026
• Launch announcement                       Apr 15, 2026
• Q1 update                                 Apr 02, 2026

February 2026
• Beta release                              Feb 28, 2026
…

/archives/2026/03/​

A month page — every online post from March 2026.

/archives/2026/W12/​

A week page — every online post from ISO week 12 (drill-down enabled to "year + month + week" only).

Theme integration​

Each archive page renders through the active theme's category template (or archive when the theme provides a dedicated one). Look + feel matches the rest of the site without per-theme work.

The archives index page uses archive template if available, falling back to a simple list of period links rendered through the theme's BaseLayout.

When the plugin's Inject "See full archives" link option is on (default), the home page and category archive pages get a link below the post list:

[ Posts grid — recent items ]

→ See full archives

This is the primary discovery path for the archives section. Without it, visitors would need to navigate to /archives/ directly — a URL most won't guess.

Archives vs. categories​

Two different organising principles:

  • Archives — by time. "What did this site publish in March 2026?"
  • Categories — by topic. "Show me all posts tagged 'tutorials'."

Both have separate URL hierarchies (/archives/... vs /<category>/) and don't conflict. Most sites benefit from offering both.

When changes apply​

ActionPages updated
Publish a post/archives/index.html + the matching year page (+ month / week if drill-down enabled)
Unpublish a postSame, + the page is deleted entirely if it emptied out
Change drill-down (e.g. year → year + month)Run Force regenerate in plugin settings

SEO considerations​

Archive pages can compete with the home page and category pages for search ranking on broad queries. Some best practices:

  • Don't include archives in your sitemap — most CMSes don't, and Google doesn't reward them with high rank. The flexweg-sitemaps plugin includes them by default; toggle off in plugin settings if you want them excluded.
  • Use <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"> on archive pages if you want crawlers to follow links from them but not index the pages themselves. Implement via a custom plugin or theme override.
  • Or just let them be — for low-traffic personal sites, archives are useful for visitors and don't hurt SEO meaningfully. Don't over-optimise.

Continue​