Which should I show: last modified date, published date, or both?

Over the years, there’s been a lot of debate about which date to show, and advice from various SEO advisors has changed back and forth. Here’s the latest consensus.

New posts

If you’ve written a new post, show the published date.

e.g. Published October 31, 2025

Minor updates to old posts

If you’ve updated an older post in a minor way, such as fixing typos, adding internal links, adjusting categories, or updating photos, use the Change Last Modified WordPress plugin to lock the last modified date and prevent it from being updated. This is important because Google can ignore or devalue your modified date if it changes for minor things. Continue showing the published date on these posts.

e.g. Published August 1, 2023

Meaningful updates to old posts

If you’ve updated an older post in a meaningful way, such as correcting content mistakes, improving instructions, changing methods, adding a video, or adding additional context, providing an FAQ based on reader feedback, etc, show the last updated date first to show its freshness and that you care about keeping content useful for your visitors.

Some sites only show the last updated date to give the clearest signal to Google that it’s fresh content. However, I think it builds trust to see when a recipe was first published as well as when it was last updated, because recipes that have been tested and improved over the years based on lots of feedback are usually better. It helps people see that the content has longevity and history. The nice thing about recipes is that they are almost always timeless. I think trust is reduced if you only see the last updated date – it feels like there’s a lack of transparency and almost makes you suspicious about how old the content is when you’re not told.

e.g. Last updated: October 31, 2025 Published: August 1, 2023

After a meaningful update, you can request that Google re-crawl the page. Give it a bit of time, then search for it in Google and check to see which date is showing in the search results. If it’s consistently showing the older published date and your click-through rate drops, you may need to switch to only displaying the last updated date on the page itself (while keeping both dates in your page’s schema code) to preserve your search click-through rate.