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Display Popular Posts On Your WordPress Website

If you own a website and you ever look at traffic analytics for your most viewed posts, you'll notice that most of them have a lot of traffic long after you've published them. You can't exactly pinpoint why a particular post is so popular. May be it was incredibly well written or may be it was well received across social media platforms because it was funny or was written by someone with a lot of social credibility.

However, creating popular posts is only one part of creating viral shareable content. Obviously, the post or article or video in question has something unique which is what makes it popular in the first place. So given that, why not have more people who visit your website view your most viewed content?

There are many ways to have your most popular content viewed multiple times over time. 

  1. Good Content gets ranked high in search for specific terms.
  2. Display your best content on your website and make it very accessible.

Remember I'm talking about what you should do to make popular content more so. Only good content consistently receives traffic over time.

Display Your Popular Content With a Plugin – Top 10 – Popular posts plugin for WordPress

admin ajaxLet's look at what you can accomplish with this plugin.

1. Search for the plugin, activate and install it from your WP dashboard. Or you could download the plugin as a zip file and upload it via an FTP client you are familiar with and then unzip. (Navigate to your WordPress folder/wp-content/plugins.)
2. The plugin is set to go right off the bat. You should be able to find the plugin's widget, under Appearances. You can add it to any of the widgetized areas of your theme.

 

3. From the widget you should be able to set the number of posts to be displayed and the time frame under consideration for popularity. You can choose to show details such as an excerpt, the publish date and the author. You can include thumbnails and specify the dimensions of said thumbnails. Normally people just choose to include posts, but if you want to, you should be able to include pages and attachments as well.

generalsettings

From the plugin settings page, the plugin offers a lot more in the way of flexibility and customization. You can display popular posts from the past day, or any number of days. And you can even set it to a couple of hours, if your website generates content at a fast pace. You can choose to look at popularity from whence you first published on your website.

styles

You can customize the HTML and craft the display to meet your preferences. And to top it off you can also change the style by modifying the CSS attributes from WP dash.

[icon link] Download Top 10 – Popular posts plugin for WordPress

WP-PostViews

widget use1. You can search for WP-PostViews from your WP dash by opening Add New under Plugins. Search for “WP-PostViews”, install and activate the plugin.
2. Please note, that displaying most popular posts was not the primary intent behind this plugin. But, it can perform that function very well nonetheless. Open Widgets from your WordPress dash, under available widgets you should be able to find a widget named “Views”.
3. Add widget “Views” to either your sidebars or your footer or any other widgetized area available in your theme.
4. You can call this section “Most Popular Posts” by renaming the title of the widget. You can show a specific number of popular posts based on the number of views. You can also discriminate based on category.

[icon link] Download WP-PostViews

Over to You!

Displaying popular content on your website is a trick many of the best websites employ.

Taken From The Politico - News Website - You'll notice the Popular Stories Listed on the right.
Taken From The Politico – News Website – You'll notice the Popular Stories Listed on the right.

You can also display content based on what any visitor on your website is currently viewing.

 

Photo of author

Article by Vishnu

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