How To Change The Publish Date After Your Post Is Published

And reasons why you might want or need to do this.

This has come up enough times with enough clients that I think it’s worthwhile sharing as a quick tip.

Did you know you can change the publish date and time after publishing your post?

Why you may want or need to do this:

You may have a series on a certain topic that needs to be displayed in ascending order, beginning at #1.

You can see a perfect example of this right here.

Lauren Streicher MD

releases podcast episodes regularly and then places them in order on a dedicated page. For these posts to appear in ascending order, we’d need to change the publish date after the fact.

How and where to change this date:

Find the post you’d like to change, click the three dots below the headline, then choose EDIT:

Once you’re in edit mode, look at the bottom right corner and you’ll see the post settings button. Click it.

Once you’re in the post settings, scroll all the way to the bottom and you’ll see this:

In that box, you can change the date and time, right down to the minute. Minutes work great if you need to rearrange several posts. You could set the first post at 6:00 a.m., the second at 5:59 a.m., then 5:58 a.m., and so on for each post.

Keep in mind that changing the time stamp will affect how the posts are displayed on your homepage as well as the series page. I wouldn’t worry too much about that, though, because as new posts populate your homepage, the series will be pushed down and eventually off the homepage. But they’ll stay in perfect order on the series page (just like in Dr. Lauren’s example).

If messing with dates and times isn’t your thing:

You can also create beautifully arranged content libraries in another way, as outlined in the following post:

We’ve got MANY how-to posts in the Unstack Substack archives.

I’d love to hear your feedback on this quick tip. Did you know about it? Do you already use it?