Voting Results: The Value of the Sidebar Archive Section

The votes are in and the winner, taking 75% of the votes, is “the standard archive-by-month sidebar section adds NO value to a blog.”

A standard part of most WordPress themes, the by-month-archive sidebar provides a link which allow a visitor to quickly see a chronological listing of all the posts for a given month. Here’s what the voters had to say about the archive sidebar section:

What the Voters Said About the Question

Graphic designer David Airey from the blog of the same name (davidairey.com) didn’t voice an opinion one way or the other, but was “interested in finding out the results.”

Armen from iffect.net thought the by-month-archive section was”not that important. For a young blog, they can have a negative effect because visitors see it’s new, and so it loses credibility. For an old blog, the vast amount of links can be overwhelming, and so people avoid clicking on any of them.”

Daniel Scocco from Daily Blog Tips has been advocating for a long time that “…monthly archives on the sidebar are a waste! If you really want to have archives, use a single page that lists all your posts.”

Ben Yoskovitz from The Instigator Blog said he “removed the Monthly Archive in the sidebar some time ago. [He] did put an Archive link at the top of Instigator Blog, and [used] a plugin to display the archive sorted by month. [He doesn't] track how many people click there and visit the archive – [his] guess: very, very few. [He] also moved to a Category Cloud instead of a laundry list. In some ways it better represents the mish mash of things [he] writes about, but [he's] never measured its effectiveness for people using the site.”

Ilker from The Thinking Blog isn’t “sure [that] having a monthly archive like [mine] helps much for the reader. What [I] might need, though, is [to] get an archive similar to the one [that she uses on her blog].”

Thanks for the Votes

Thanks to everyone that voted and special thanks to all those that left comments in response to the question. Looks like it’s time for me to strip that by-month-archive section form my sidebar and replace it with something a little more useful.