Having numerous contents on your blog is a good thing especially if your content is seo friendly. Meaning, your readers have to dig through your archives to find your best content. This takes time and energy and they may end up losing interest. A concerned writer will find a way to help them easily access the best content. You can do this by highlighting your most popular posts for easy access.
Guiding your new readers who are not familiar with your site helps to keep them even longer on your site. A good thing is that there are many post plugins for bloggers that can simplify this process. The benefits of guiding your readers are that the more the visitors the more engaged with your website they become. This gives you a chance to turn visitors into loyal subscribers. Another benefit of Google’s ranking algorithm analyzes on-site metrics, and good performance can give your site a timely boost up the SERPs, granting you more visibility and more visitors.
This post samples the best WordPress blog post plugins, exploring the pros cons, and where they are best suited. Here are the best 4 best popular post plugins for WordPress that you can use.
Table of Contents
1. WordPress Popular Posts
WordPress popular posts is a free WordPress theme that shows the popular posts of your site. It’s powerful and offers you several customization options to match your requirements. This plugin allows you to show the most popular posts based on views or comments. You can even give a timeline on a specific content. You can select the most popular posts from last 24 hours, last 7 days, and last 30 days. The widget shows a very basic list of customizing options. You can also customize the plugin to show the thumbnail of the post to make it look better.
Other than the widget you can also use the shortcode offered by the plugin to display the popular posts within a post or a page. This plugin offers you detailed statistics of the most popular posts of your blog in the WordPress admin dashboard.
2. WordPress Popular Posts (Free)
This WordPress blog post plugin as over 200,000 installs and has a rating of 4.5-star satisfaction rating. What makes it popular is that it’s easy to customize and use. You can add several widgets, each with its own separate setting, which is useful for various available options. WordPress popular posts allow you to display popular posts within a specified period of time (e.g. last 24 hours or last seven days), including custom post types, and with or without thumbnails.
Posts can be displayed based on number of comments, number of views, or average views per day. A shortcode is available to insert the most popular posts within your site’s content, if you don’t want to use the widget. An alternative, template tag can be used to embed the most popular posts anywhere in your theme.
See More: How to Write Ideal Content if You are not Good in English
3. Popular Widget (Free)
Popular Widget popular post plugin for WordPress displays popular posts, recent comments, and tags in a tabbed widget. It has over 10,000 active installs and a 4.6-star satisfaction rating make this plugin a popular choice. The Popular Widget displays popular posts by most commented or most viewed, and the posts can be filtered by date range, author, or category. Display options for the widget include whether to display thumbnails, excerpts, and counts. Popular Widget offers something slightly different to the other plugins featured today which is a tabbed popular posts widget. This means you can display your most viewed articles and your most commented articles in the same widget, with visitors being able to click on a tab to switch between them. You can also display a tab for the articles most recently posted or most recently commented, as well as a separate tab for articles with specific tags attached. For the popularity tabs, you are able to specify a data range to be analyzed (by default this is set to one year). The widget itself looks good, with a simple but effective design, and the addition of the tabs makes the widget look and feel more sophisticated. You can select how many posts will appear in each section, as well as whether you want to display a thumbnail and the number of page views. You can also include an excerpt of each article (you can select how many characters to display) and, in the case of the most recent comments tab, an excerpt of the comment itself. You can display popular posts in any widget area of your website. There is also an option of excluding articles under certain categories.
4. Stylish Popular Posts (FREE)
Stylish Popular Posts enables the user to add the most stylish popular post sections of any free plugin to your website. The WordPress popular post plugin developers focused more on its stylish looks rather than delivery, since the plugin has a simple process for determining a post’s popularity. It only factors in the number of comments per post. Stylish Popular Posts considers only all comments, instead of a specified period of time. This puts newer posts at a disadvantage. This can be overlooked given how beautiful the popular content looks in the widget sections of your website. The popular posts section displays stylish, chunky thumbnails that fill the widget area, with the title and date published displayed over the thumbnail. There is also a small colored circle in the bottom corner of each thumbnail, displaying the popularity rank of each post. You can only have control over how many posts the plugin displays. However, if you are more concerned with the looks of your popular post section rather than sophistication for judging popularity, then you should opt for this plugin.
Final Remarks
To find and keep loyal readers for your website is important to boost traffic. Your new readers don’t have time to peruse through your old posts. It is up to you to make them easily available. Showcase the posts that have performed the best whether through views or comments. Old popular posts also give an idea of what your readers should expect from you in the future. All these WordPress popular posts plugins have their strengths and weaknesses. It is up to you to decide which one suits your blogging needs.
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