Should you delete your old Pinterest pins? In the three-plus years that I have been an avid reader and listener of Pinterest marketing advice, I have learned that the simple answer is no: you should NOT delete your old pins.
While I have followed this advice, I still sometimes look through old pins on my boards that have only a couple of impressions. I can’t help but be tempted to delete them in hopes that the action will somehow shake things up and revitalize my growth on the platform.
Today, I’d like to share one of my old pins that had zero traction until only a few months ago. I hope this case study provides actual evidence that old pins can see an engagement spike out of the blue and, hopefully, increase your reach.
My old Pinterest pin that grew out of the blue
Now, it’s hard to date this pin accurately, but I know it was one of the earlier ones I ever saved to the platform. With the Keywords Everywhere plugin toggled on in my browser, it shows the pin was created two years ago, though I suspect it’s older. It was a random inspirational saying I came up with, slapped onto Canva with a simple background, and published on Pinterest. The URL on this pin actually led to an Instagram post because I had so few blog posts at the time, and none felt relevant to the content.
Some months ago, I started getting in-app notifications about people saving my pin. Whenever Pinterest starts notifying me of saves, that’s usually my cue that a pin is gaining traction. I wish I had acted faster; I left the pin as is for about two months before I realized the notifications weren’t stopping. As a more savvy creator with a larger blog post portfolio, I finally changed the URL so that users would be led to my website (better as it’s is my own real estate!).
In this post, I’m sharing data from the last 180 days. Unfortunately, Pinterest only lets us go back that far (save your analytics, friends!), but that’s okay in this case, as I’m certain the pin had zero impressions, clicks, or saves beforehand
Pin analytics showing the growth of my old pin
As you can see, sometime in October 2025, my pin impressions shot up from 0 to 730 in the span of a single day. That’s pretty impressive for a pin I honestly would have deleted were it not for the advice I’d seen online.
It’s hard to say why this pin suddenly got this boost. It was a random inspirational pin that wasn’t even keyword optimized in the title or description. Anyway, let’s leave that up to the Pinterest algorithm and look at November.
November saw the greatest improvement. Imagine going from 730 impressions to over 27,000! Impressions, of course, are nothing without engagement, but this growth came with a jump in clicks and saves, and even a few outbound clicks. Unfortunately, I still hadn’t changed the URL by this point; it still pointed to Instagram which is a platform where I’m not even active (🙄).
Though December saw a bit of a drop in the major metrics, it’s still pretty damn good. The pin still earned decent engagement and outbound clicks.
By the time January rolled around, I had finally changed the URL to a related blog post. It’s a pity I waited that long, as my outbound clicks were cut in half.
By the way, am I the only one who overthinks url relevance? There are so many popular pins out there that lead to a home page or a completely unrelated blog post. While I know it’s not best practice, I’m just saying, don’t overthink your pin destination’s relevance too much.
Looking at the February and March analytics, the pin is losing its popularity, but that’s perfectly fine with me. It was a nice, unexpected boost that proved Pinterest is a long game. It taught me to keep pinning and wait things out. In a previous post, I mentioned Tailwind’s research finding about only about 20% of pins actually driving engagement. It’s important to keep in mind that many of the pins we publish won’t gain traction immediately. But since you have no idea which pin will pop off next, it’s best to leave them all intact.
All in all, this old pin’s newfound popularity gained me a total of 112,000 impressions, over 4,000 clicks, 397 saves, 49 outbound clicks, and one profile visit. Not too shabby.
So, let me know in the comments: Have you ever had an old pin grow out of nowhere, or are you still struggling with the dilemma of whether to delete your pins? Until next time, happy pinning!
