Lisa Butler

Need to write a post quickly? Update an old one!

Once a post is published, I don’t really give it a second thought unless someone asks me a related question. When I deleted nearly 500 posts from my blog, I uncovered a few years’ worth of posts that are still valuable.

Sure, people still come across them from time to time through my Revive Old Post tweets, and I try to add a P.S. to most posts to direct to a related post from the archives. But a lot can change in a year (or even just a few months!) — from technology, to my own personal opinions and experiences.

So a few weeks ago when I was short on time, I thought it would be a great time to update an old post. After all, half the work is already done! Updating and republishing an old post gives new readers a chance to discover the content, and regular readers to take action if they haven’t already, or consider a new point of view. Here are a few ways to breathe new life into old posts.


Updating an old post gives new readers a chance to discover the content.
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Add a little extra

Lately I’ve been trying to add downloads to my posts when I can to make it easy for readers to save the information for later. This is especially good for instructional content that readers may not be able to act on at the time they first read it. Adding a worksheet or a step-by-step guide can turn your original post from simply sharing information to inspiring action.

Expand on a specific point

Maybe you wrote a general guide on a topic, but you could have written 1,000 more words on one section alone. Do it! Choose a paragraph from something you’ve already written and use it as an outline to expand in more detail.


Use a paragraph from an old post as an outline for a new post.
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Talk about why you changed your mind

Let’s say you wrote an opinion piece, but more recent experiences have led you to change your mind. I’ve actually updated an old post twice because of this — first I talked about why I shut down comments, then I wrote a more detailed post on why it helped me, then I wrote another post on why I opened them back up again. I thought it would be a bit weird at first to have contradictory posts on my site. But together, the three posts offer a more full picture of the pros and cons of shutting down comments for people who are evaluating their options.

Fix outdated information

I write a lot about WordPress, which means that at some point in time, the technology is going to change and render my posts useless. Simply updating the information without republishing means my readers won’t be aware of the updates — only new people discovering the post will. So when I updated my post on adding a pin it hover to images, I republished it and redirected the old post to the new one.

Have you updated an old post? How did you breathe new life into it?

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