8 Best WordPress Archive Plugin to Display the Archives

Are you looking for the best WordPress Archive Plugin?

An Archive plugin displays the old posts of the blog. The visitor can easily search the blog to find the content. The archive makes the navigation of the site smoother for the viewers.

Good user experience is essential for SEO. Also, when the visitor surf through the archive, the bounce rate decreases. Eventually, it helps in improving the ranking of the blog.

Read the Best SEO Tips for WordPress Blog.

Why Using Archive?

As the blog grows, so is the number of posts on the blog. You cannot display all of them on your homepage or side widgets. 

The Menu helps in the navigation of the site. The search box is used to find posts related to a keyword.

Displaying archives means displaying all the posts of the blog in a hierarchical form. The hierarchy could be of anyway – by date, authors, tags, categories, etc., etc.

Because of this, a visitor could easily read the old posts and find out the old content of your site. The archive makes the work easy for both visitors and webmasters.

It also helps in SEO by improving the engagement rate and user experience.

Best Free WordPress Archive Plugin 

Most of the time, WordPress themes do not give you any function to add the archives of the posts. In this article, I am going to tell you the best plugin to create an archive for your WordPress blog.

• Simple Yearly Archive
• Archive Page
• Archivist – Custom Archive Templates
• Clean my Archives
• JQuery Archive List Widget
• Smart Archives Reloaded
• Snazzy Archives
• Annual Archive

Install the plugin and activate it. After activating, you can add the shortcode to start showing the archives.

Simple Yearly Archive

It is a simple archive plugin with a basic interface. Simple Yearly Archive lets you display the yearly archives of the posts.

The plugin shows the years on the top of the page to make navigation easy. All the posts of that year open up as a list. Simple Yearly Archive allows you to set the date format and the order of the post shown.

This plugin only shows the posts in the archive, not pages.

However, it is an excellent plugin if you are looking to present the old posts of your blog.

Archive Page

Archive Page allows you to create a simple archive list with the shortcodes. You can create up to eight shortcodes, and it supports all the languages.

With eight shortcodes, you can make eight different types of archives, like archives by months, week, post categories, tags, authors, etc. You can also display the pages with Archive Page.

This WordPress Archive Plugin is customizable and lets you display the archive pages and post in various formations.

Must check out if you want a simple solution.

Archivist — Custom Archive Templates

As the name suggests, Archivist is a highly flexible and customizable WordPress archive plugin to display the archives.

The plugin can show the archive by tags, categories, year, authors, publication title, date, with the default setting. Moreover, Archivist comes to its true potential when it works with the Advance Custom Field.

You can create as many as many templates as you want. It also allows you to add the CSS to build an attractive looking Archive List. 

This plugin also does not support the custom archive for pages.

Clean My Archives

Clean My Archive is the most basic archive plugin with minimal settings. 

This archive Plugin makes an organized list of all the posts by month and years. You can set the archive page quickly as the interface is very userfriendly.

The plugin is handy for the site that has a large number of posts, and the archive page could be heavy. Clean My Archives can work with any WordPress caching plugins to enhance the loading speed of large archive pages. 

JQuery Archive List Widget

You can create a collapsible archive list with the JQuery Archive List Widget. Then you can set it up on your widget, and it will not grab much space. 

This plugin used jQuery to perform its function, which means the plugin will work smoothly on all the browsers and devices.

Features of JQuery List:

• Change the design of collapse/expand button
• Apply various archive filters
• Exclude the custom categories
• Support Shortcodes
• Work for Multiple Languages
• Compatible with minifying and caching plugins

This is an amazing WordPress Archive Plugin to use on the widget.

Smart Archives Reloaded

The plugin smartly puts up the archive posts of your blog. Smart archive Reloaded allows you to choose various formats to display the archives.

It adds multiple ways to display the archives that make the navigation much more manageable. That helps the visitors to read the past posts conveniently.

After installing the plugin, just add the [smart_archives] wherever you want to add the archives.

Snazzy Archives

If you want to make a visualized archive page, Snazzy is an excellent plugin for you. 

You can try different looks and styles to display the archives. The visualization effects make the archive interesting to glance and find the posts in a smart way.

The plugin displays the thumbnail images at the blocks of the old posts. It creates a visual timeline of the site and makes the archive page stand out.

Features of Snazzy Archive

• Amazing Visualisation of Posts
• Images and Videos are shown at the Posts
• Edit with HTML and CSS
• Special effects by JQuery
• Integrate Caching for fast loading

Annual Archive

It is another free WordPress Archive Plugin that allows you to create an archive. You can display archives by day, week, month, categories, etc. 

Annual archive is a flexible plugin, and the posts can be listed in groups by decades. The archive could be added anywhere with a shortcode. 

The plugin is compatible with all the languages and caching plugins.

Final Words

If you have lots of posts on your blog, you should display the archive of the posts.

The visitors could read your old posts easily. It is also a great way to bring traffic to all of your posts.

Don’t forget to share with me how displaying archives helped your blog.