Being able to set expiry dates for posts is especially useful when you’re promoting a time-sensitive offer.

Coupons, discounts and other such things expire with time and generally don’t go indefinitely.

Even with expiring posts there are two different ways in which you will be able to set those up.

For time-sensitive content which is no longer useful after a period, the expiration date plugin is quite handy. Sales and promotions belong to this category. Black Friday is upon us and bloggers are collecting and promoting coupons left and right.

But what after Black Friday? Those coupons and heavy discounts are no longer valid. Hence the need for setting up an expiration date.

You can also use this method to create artificial scarcity to boost sales by adding a sense of urgency.

They will miss out on the promotion, on the deal if they don’t act quickly. The Fear of Missing out is what promotes action here.

First is regular content and other evergreen content. Regular expiry posts expire at the same time for every visitor. So if a visitor finds the page for the first time and the coupon or deal has expired just before his visit, the page remains expired.

Evergreen posts take a different angle or approach.

In this case, based on the time of visit the page may still be active.

This unique approach employs cookies to allow visitors the countdown timer. So the deal which is active for 3 days will be active when the visitor sees it for the first time and remains so until his three days expire.

Simple post expiration is a free plugin that lets you do that.

You can set a date for expiration with the plugin.

And you can use a shortcode to dynamically alter and show a different piece of content say instead of the coupon code, a message that says that the deal’s over.

Once you have installed and activated the plugin the settings associated with the plugin start to display on your post page.

How to use the plugin?

Search for the plugin in the Plugins Repository.

Under the left sidebar where you generally have publishing options you will see a new option above the calendar to set post expiry dates too.

Here’s what I am talking about:

Whenever you click to post a new blog post or edit an existing one you can set the expiration dates.

Once the post gets expired it will show Expired on the blog post title.

Here I set the expiry date to 28th of November.

The post will have a word Expired appended at the beginning of the post title. However the post content remains unchanged.

Here’s what I am talking about:

What if you need the post to display a custom block of text?

Once the post expires this plugin also gives you an option to display custom content in place of extant content.

Again if you need custom content to be displayed once the post’s expired here’s how you do it.

Suppose the message is the post is gone.

So what you need to do is this:

This new message will display itself when you add the shortcode. The sentence between the shortcodes gets displayed. You could say that the promotion is no longer available.

For more options you will need to use premium plugins.

This free plugin offers expiration posts in the simplest manner.