How to display lastest post date in the homepage?

Question

I'm looking forward to display, somewhere in the homepage of a WP site, a legend saying:

Last updated: XX/XX

by grabbing the date from the most recent post, but not showing any of its content, just the date.

Is there any quick way to do this?

Answer 1

I would save an option on post save:

add_action(
  'save_post',
  function($id,$p) {
    if (
      (defined('DOING_AUTOSAVE') && DOING_AUTOSAVE) 
      || (defined('DOING_AJAX') && DOING_AJAX)
      || ($p->post_status === 'auto-draft')
    ) {
      return;
    }
    update_option('_last_site_update',$p->post_date);
  },
  1,2
);

And retrieve it with a variant of the function provided by @G-M :

function my_last_updated( $format = '' ) {
  $last = get_option('_last_site_update');
  if ( empty($last) ) return;
  if ( empty($format) ) {
    $format = get_option('date_format');
  }
  return mysql2date($format,$last);
}
echo my_last_updated();

This way you:

1. push the heavy lifting to the admin side,
2. eliminate the unnecessary work of a full post query (via wp_get_recent_posts),
3. replace that heavy query with a very simple get_option query,
4. and make the whole thing cache-friendly

Answer 2

There are different way to do this.

The easiest, in my opinion is to use wp_get_recent_posts to retrieve the last post and the print the post modified date.

Wrapping it in a function make it flexible and reusable. In your functions.php you can put:

function my_last_updated( $format = '' ) {
  $lasts = wp_get_recent_posts( array('numberposts'=>1, 'post_status'=>'publish') );
  if ( empty($lasts) ) return;
  $last = array_pop($lasts);
  if ( empty($format) ) $format = get_option('date_format');
  return mysql2date( $format, $last['post_modified'] );
}

Then you can use it like so:

<p>Last updated: <?php echo my_last_updated() ?>.</p>

The argument $format let you choose a different date format for the date see here to choose one. If nothing is passed, the format set in WP options is used.