WordPress is a powerful content management system optimized for website search engine visibility. Out of the box, WordPress Core includes essential SEO features that support on-page SEO.
But what happens when you start publishing content and have several dozen, hundreds, or even thousands of draft posts left unpublished? Then you wonder whether unpublished WordPress drafts affect SEO.
Don’t worry; in today’s post, I’ll clear up the confusion and show you how to optimize WordPress content and your database for better SEO rankings and performance.
I’ve been here for over a decade, so naturally, I have experience dealing with issues like whether WordPress draft posts affect search engine rankings.
First, if you’re new to this, let’s define what qualifies as unpublished or draft posts in WordPress.
What are Draft Posts in WordPress?
A WordPress draft post is an unpublished version of a blog post or page you create in the WordPress editor. It’s essentially a work-in-progress that isn’t yet ready to be published and seen by the public, and it is saved in the WordPress draft folder.
WordPress has three essential folders for saving posts. These folders are Published, Draft, and Trash.
The Published folder saves every published post that the public can see, the Draft folder holds every post that has not yet been published, and the Trash folder temporarily holds deleted posts.
WordPress holds deleted posts in the trash folder for 30 days, then permanently deletes them automatically.
Only a WordPress blog admin, the author of a draft post, and those with editor access can see the list of draft posts. An admin can access draft, published, and trash posts, regardless of the WordPress user role that created them.
How WordPress Unpublished Posts Affect SEO
Unpublished WordPress posts do not directly or negatively affect SEO. However, unpublished draft posts can indirectly lead to poor SEO rankings for your site.
Here are three ways unpublished WordPress draft posts can negatively affect SEO.
1. Bulky Database
WordPress uses a database to store website files and data, including draft posts, post revisions, transients, spam comments, trash posts, themes, etc.
Over time, this data takes up a huge amount of space and creates different kinds of tables in the database.
Each time a request is made to your origin server, WordPress has to retrieve the information from the database following several steps and stops. The faster the process can be completed, the better the site’s performance and speed.
When you have many unpublished draft posts and other data in your database that aren’t regularly optimized, it can slow database performance, which can hurt overall site speed and how search engines perceive your site.
Website speed and performance are part of the search engine ranking factors; this is where unpublished draft posts now become a problem for your site.
2. Bad User Experience
Let’s say you’ve previously published a post with internal links to other content on your site (and vice versa), and for whatever reason, you decided to unpublish it.
This post also has incoming links from other websites.
When you unpublish it, users coming from external websites already linking to the page and users finding the page from internal links will see a 404 Not Found page.
Search engines, too, will waste crawl budgets on URLs that no longer exist on your site, wasting search engine resources and giving users a bad website experience.
3. Increasing Total Page Size
Imagine having thousands of draft posts containing videos, large-size graphics, and other media content formats.
This unnecessarily adds to the overall page size, which can lead to slow loading times, poor CWV, and several technical SEO issues.
This can become a serious problem if you don’t have a good caching and performance optimization mechanism working on your server.
4. Indexing Issues and Loss of Traffic
If you revert already indexed posts to draft (posts indexed by search engines and driving traffic), it may lead to indexing issues and loss of organic search engine traffic.
Assuming this post or page ranks in the SERP, you’ll lose traffic going to this post/page.
The URLS will then be added to the page indexing error list in Google Search Console under the not found (404) error log.
While this isn’t an SEO problem, traffic loss is something to consider before reverting a published post to a draft.
How to Ensure Unpublished Draft Posts Don’t Affect SEO
Unpublished WordPress posts won’t negatively affect your website’s SEO if you keep a healthy database.
Here are some tips to keep your WordPress site running smoothly and optimize for SEO without worrying about the negative impact of unpublished drafts.
1. Optimize WordPress Database
Regularly optimizing your WordPress database will improve SEO, site speed, performance, and user experience.
WordPress has several plugins that let you automatically optimize your database with one click. The most popular and free option is the WP-Optimize database plugin.
This plugin automatically optimizes the databases. It cleans up post revisions and draft posts, optimizes tables, removes transients, deletes spam comments, trash posts, and comments, and more.
You can schedule a regular optimization task and forget about it. It will run on schedule and clean up your database.
2. Delete Draft Posts You Don’t Need
If you no longer need to work on that draft post and it has no purpose, delete it on time.
There’s no point in keeping a post you will not publish on your blog unless there’s a valid reason.
3. Delete WordPress post Revision
WordPress auto-saves a version of your post when writing in the editor every 60 seconds. This means that if you keep writing for hours, you might have several versions stored in the database.
You don’t need more than your post’s four or five most recent versions in history.
If things go wrong, such as a sudden loss of internet connection, a browser shutting down, or a computer crashing, you can easily revert to a previous version, restore your post, and continue your work from there.
You can control the number of saved revisions or disable them completely using plugins such as Disable Post Revisions.
4. Keep Draft Posts Externally.
I write and store draft posts in Google Docs. This has several advantages over writing in the WordPress editor and saving draft copies.
First, the Google Docs editor is more distraction-free than the WordPress editor. Although you can switch the WordPress editor to distraction-free mode, it doesn’t provide as smooth a writing experience as Google Docs.
NOTE:
Here is a WordPress distraction-free mode editor screen. As you can see in the image, there are no visible admin sidebar elements, panels, or menus. It is a plain screen canvas editor.
Another advantage of using Docs is that your draft content is stored on Google Cloud, allowing you to access it from anywhere on any device. So, even if you lose your blog or can’t access it, you can easily get your posts from your Google account and republish them on a new blog or after fixing your old one.
Thirdly, it’s easier to give edit access and work with freelancers in Google Docs without security concerns than with your WordPress blog.
Granting freelancers access to your WordPress blog raises several security concerns that may not be comfortable with.
5. Use 301 Redirects
If you unpublish a post with links pointing to it, you must 301 redirect those links to a relevant post on your blog to help users find similar content.
This helps preserve the user experience instead of showing a 404 Not Found page. Several SEO plugins handle redirects efficiently. RankMath has built-in redirect functionality.
Conclusion…
Unpublished WordPress draft posts shouldn’t affect your SEO if you focus on keeping a healthy, clean, lightweight website.
Regularly optimizing the database, deleting unwanted draft posts, trashing comments, pages, and transients, minimizing post revisions, and optimizing tables will help keep your WordPress blog running smoothly and optimize performance.
