The Archive block in the WordPress Block Editor

Gutenberg A-Z: The Archive block

The Archive block is a pretty simple block in the WordPress Block Editor that allows you to display a monthly archive of all your posts.

Dropdown style

There’s only two unique settings for this block:

  • Display as dropdown: Turning this on will change the block from being a long list of months into a compact dropdown menu. 
  • Show post counts: This shows the number of posts you published next to the month in parentheses.

If you have a lot of posts going way back, you may want to set the drop down to save space. In the example on the right, I’m displaying sample posts from the WordPress Theme Unit Test, which puts about two dozen months worth of posts.

Where would you use the Archive Block?

The Archive block would probably work well somewhere in like an About page or perhaps a site map somewhere. It’s generally for users to be able to quickly get to a month’s worth of posts in one click or in the case of the dropdown, one selection.