When most people look through your archives they are usually trying to find posts by their topic rather than looking to see a list of every article you ever published. To make your archives page more user friendly there are many things you can do but one of the best is to use a plugin like Smart Archives Reloaded for WordPress. This plugin allows you to organized and style your archives page very easily.

Before we start go and download the Smart Archives Reloaded Plugin for WordPress. Once you have activated the plugin you should notice a “Smart Archives” link under the Settings tab in your WordPress admin panel.

If you click on this link you will be taken to a Settings Page where you can configure how you want your archives to display. You have the option of excluding certain categories by ID and formatting the layout of your list.

To display your archives you have a couple options. First, you can make a new page and include this shortcode:

The other method would be to add the following code anywhere in your theme where you want your archives to display:

Once you are done you should have something that looks like this: