One of the most important things to do with your website is to make sure that your Homepage is as clutter-free as possible. This is especially the case for Blog websites. You want to make sure that your Blog page displays posts that well represents your website. Perhaps you can even configure the front page to boost views on specific category posts. Moreover, there are cases where you might have to ensure that your home page posts are filtered. This is where we can use WordPress Exclude Category Plugins.
By default, WordPress blogs show your most recently posted blog straight on your home page. This means all the blogs that you post will automatically show up on the front page regardless of your choice. A smart way to keep your Home page more minimal or low profile is to simply hide some of the posts based on their categories. This is the purpose of WordPress Exclude from home page plugins.
These plugins are made to help you easily filter your posts on your front page. Simply install these nifty plugins, enable them and choose what categories or tags to filter out. This provides you with control of visibility over your front-page posts. Ensure that your viewers only see the blogs that you want to show using these amazing WordPress plugins.
So, let’s take a look at some of these plugins that you can possibly choose as well as the process of using them on your website. We’ve chosen 3 from a huge list of plugins available on WordPress.org and have even provided a short tutorial based off one of them!
Best WordPress Exclude Category plugins:
1) WP Hide Post
Simple through and through, Wp Hide post is a WordPress Exclude Category plugin made for the simple purpose of hiding posts of different categories from the homepage. Simply download, install and activate the plugin and use its simple options to exclude category posts from the homepage. Choose if you want to exclude the posts on your front page, category page, tag page, feeds, search results and more. Furthermore, WP Hide post is not only sitemaps friendly but you can also choose to hide categories entirely from the blog itself.
Key features:
- Easy to set up and enable.
- Minimal and simplified options menu.
- Posts can be individually hidden from the front page or the entire blog itself.
2) Specify Home Hidden Categories
This simple, yet extremely useful WordPress Exclude Category from home page plugin is a great beginner friendly plugin built to be compatible with all kinds of themes and plugins. Specify Home Hidden Categories‘s easy to use options ensure that your hidden category settings don’t interfere with the rest of your website and you can manage your front page and your blogs to your heart’s content.
Key features:
- Extremely user-friendly.
- Hides posts from both Frontpage and RSS feeds.
- Compatible with all plugins that use have_posts() and get_posts() calls.
3) Ultimate Category Excluder
This complete Category exclusion package lets you quickly choose what categories to exclude from your homepage. Furthermore, you can also choose to exclude the category from search results, feeds as well as the archives. Individually choose which categories to exclude from where using the plugin’s simple yet intuitive options. Ultimate Category Excluder is designed to be not only beginner friendly but also compatible with the rest of your theme and plugin settings too.
Key features:
- Easy Category Exclude options.
- Allows excluding from Search, Archives, and Feeds.
- Completely free and freely accessible.
How to use WordPress Exclude Category plugin:
For this demonstration, we’ll be using Ultimate Category excluder as it is extremely easy to set up and configure. The simple settings screen lets you easily choose what categories to exclude and furthermore, you can exclude posts from your front page, archives, search bar and feeds.
So, go ahead and install the Ultimate Category Excluder plugin on your WordPress website. If you are unsure how to do so, consider going through this article.
Now, to open the Exclude category settings, open your WordPress Admin dashboard. Then, hover over settings and then click on Category Excluder.
This should open the Ultimate Category Excluder options page. On this page, you can Exclude a category selectively from the front page, feeds, archives and search results. To exclude a category from the homepage, simply click on the checkbox under the Exclude from Frontpage column on the right category.
You can do the same on multiple columns to exclude the category from feeds or search results and archives.
Once you’re done, click on Update and now the Category’s post should be excluded from your front page.
Similarly, you can also choose to hide various categories on the search results and more by doing the same for the other columns.
Concluding:
Thus, following these simple steps and using any of the plugins above you can choose to exclude category posts from your front page. If you decide to use any of these plugins above, why not comment about your experience with them. Moreover, if you have any issues using these plugins, we’ll be more than welcome to help you out with the procedure.
Additionally, if you want to learn more about front page and WordPress website customization, why not check out some of our other articles here: