REVISED POST
I am trying to go a different route as the suggested answer to this post didn’t work for me.
I am using child theme where I added nav widget with custom menu ‘archive’ containing only one page ‘archives’. I used <?php dynamic_sidebar( 'sidebar-2' ); ?> in my index.php and it links to archive.php view which I was kind of trying to achieve to output my posts in yearly format
PROBLEM: Child theme still adds this ‘archives’ page to Primary menu even though I have ‘Automatically add new top-level pages to this menu’ unchecked. I checked parent theme functions.php but didn’t find any function that can be the reason for that. I know this is the default WP behaviour.How can I stop automatically adding pages in my child theme?
BELOW IS THE OLD POST
get_archives_link first parameter description is “$url
(string) (Required) URL to archive.” does it mean it has to be URL to the actual archive page? can it be used to output a link to archive view (archive.php) from single.php?
below is a screenshot of the post footer from my single.php to illustrate how I am looking to output a link to archive view handled by archive.php
following is the code in my single.php post footer section
I’ve done extensive search on Codex but was not able to find a tag that can link to archive.php