How to display today's date in WordPress (2 easy ways)

Do you want to display today's date in WordPress?

Many news websites, online journals, and frequently updated blogs may want to show the current date and time. This allows users to know the current date and when the content was published.

In this article, we will show you how to easily display today's date or current time on your WordPress website.

Why do you display today's date in WordPress?

Many news sites display current dates in the title section of their website, especially small news sites that publish their main stories every day.

This assures the user that they are viewing the latest version of the online version of the publication. This is a useful style decision, and many news sites are still in use, although the homepage is updated several times a day.

Similarly, online journals and bloggers have adopted this style. This ensures that the user is viewing the latest entries on the blog.

In other usage scenarios, you may want to display only the current date and time.

For example, if your live chat is taking place at a specific time and you want to show the customer the time you are in your geographic location. Alternatively, you are running a countdown timer activity and want to display the current date to create a stronger FOMO effect.

That being said, let's see how to easily display today's date, day of the week, or current time on your WordPress website. We will introduce two methods:

1. Show today's date by adding code to the template file
2. Use a shortcode to display today's date anywhere

Method 1: Display today's date by adding code to the template file

WordPress does not come with a default widget or block to display the current date or time.

However, you can still use some very simple code to display the current date or time.

You can add this simple code to the template file for the WordPress theme you want to display time:

You can also use your own format tag to output dates in any other format. For example, using the following code, you can print dates in month, day, year formats.

This approach allows you to add code directly to your WordPress theme file, but is not very flexible. What if you want to display the current date and time in a WordPress post, page, or sidebar widget?

The next method allows you to add dates and times anywhere on your website.

Method 2: Use the shortcode to display today's date anywhere (recommended)

For this method, we will create a short code and then use it to display the date and time anywhere on the WordPress website.

You can add the following code to the theme's functions.php file, or use a custom code snippet plugin, such as WPCode (recommended):

This code just creates a short code that displays the current date. You can use it by adding this shortcode anywhere on the website:

[date-today]

By default, the shortcode displays the date in the default date format in WordPress settings.

You can also use your own date format by modifying the shortcode as follows:

[date-today format='F j, Y']

We hope this article helps you understand how to easily display today's dates in WordPress. You may also want to check out our guide on how to add weather forecasts in WordPress, or our expertly selected Best Quiz Plugins for WordPress.

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