How to display WordPress Popular Posts: Top 3 WP Popular Post Plugins
If you have a news magazine website or a blog, you may want to display popular posts in a unique and attractive way. The reason is simple – your site visitors might love to see the best content on your site at a glimpse without having to browse through the entire site. With a WordPress website, it’s very simple to display popular articles with the help of plugins or widgets.
For a new user planning to create a new WordPress blog or magazine website, you may not need to worry or even read this post. It is so because most of the WordPress magazine themes and blog themes have in-built popular posts feature or integration with a specific plugin providing this feature. So, all you need to do is to look for this feature on the theme you are going to use for your new website.
Not an issue for the existing websites either. You can easily add popular posts section on your WP website using a plugin. And, no wonder there are plenty powerful WordPress popular post plugins for you.
Watch Video Tutorial
Top 3 WP Popular Posts Plugins for 2017
Among various plugins available on the web, we have handpicked the best 3 WordPress plugins for displaying popular posts. Most of these plugins offer a popular post widget which you can add on your widget-ready areas on your site.
Let’s explore them:
1. Jetpack (Free + Premium plans)
Jetpack by WordPress.com is one of the must-have WordPress plugins as it comes bundled up with a number of amazing features and functionalities. It helps you to keep your website secure and backed up, increase traffic with SEO tools, and create engaging content. Literally, there are several enticing features this plugin provides, however, we’ll focus on popular posts widget on this post.
As you install and activate this plugin, you will be asked to connect to WordPress.com as shown in the image below.
Next, you’ll be redirected to Jetpack pricing plans where you can choose one of their premium plans or start with free. WordPress Popular Posts widget is available on the free plan so, we’ll go with the free plan.
Next, you can activate the Jetpack features as per your need by going to Jetpack> Settings.
Now, you can go to ‘Widgets‘ menu in ‘Appearance‘ to see the added widgets. You can see more than 10 Jetpack widgets along with the default WordPress widgets. Now, locate the widget called ‘Top Posts and Pages (Jetpack)‘.
Now, you can drag and drop it anywhere in the widget-ready areas (usually sidebars or footer) on your site.
As shown in the image above, you can set the maximum number of posts to show, types of pages, and display type.
2. WordPress Popular Posts (Free)
Unlike Jetpack with multiple features, WordPress Popular Posts is an exclusive popular posts widget for WordPress. It is the most popular free WordPress plugin for displaying most popular posts on your website.
The plugin offers a highly customizable widget so that you can display the best content on your website in the way you want. It allows you to place the widget in multiple places, define time range, sorting options and more.
First, install and activate the plugin. Then, go to Appearance> Widgets where you will see a new widget WordPress Popular Posts added.
Next, you can drag and drop the widget in the widget-ready areas on your website.
Now customize the widget the way you like and save it. And, you are done. It’s really simple adding the popular posts section on your blog using the widget.
Besides, you can display the popular posts by two other techniques using this plugin: Shortcode and Template tag. You can us [wpp] shortcode to show your most popular posts on pages. Similarly, you can use wpp_get_mostpopular() template tag to insert most popular posts on your site.
Download WordPress Popular Posts
3. WP Tab Widget (Free + Premium)
If you want a more advanced way to display popular posts along with recent posts, comments, and tags in a tabbed section, WP Tab Widget is the perfect plugin. The two plugins mentioned above allow you to show only the popular posts in one section but it has multipurpose of displaying multiple categories of content in tabs. Also, you are free to show only popular posts.
For example, you can take a look at the tab section demo screenshot below.
Using this plugin is also very simple. It’s also a free plugin so you can simply install the plugin from the official WordPress plugin repository.
Next, go to Appearance> Widgets. There you can see a new widget added ‘WP Tab Widget by MyThemeShop‘.
Now, you can place the widget anywhere on widget-ready areas on your WP site.
Then, you can further customize what to show and how to show on the tabbed section. Even you can select only one tab and show it only in the entire section (like other plugins do for popular posts). You can select the tabs to show, arrange the tab order, pagination, number of posts to show, post thumbnails, etc.
Wrapping Up
WordPress platform is undisputedly the simplest website platform, so no wonder there are simple solutions to every tiny or large problem. As discussed above, displaying WordPress popular posts also seems very simple and easy. Hopefully, this post was helpful to you.
If you still have any confusion, feel free write to us in the comment section below.
You may also like
