Want to showcase your blog’s most popular posts and engage new readers with your site right away?
Table of Contents
WordPress Popular Posts: Quick Review
The WordPress Popular Posts plugin is a simple plugin that allows you to filter out your most post popular posts based on comments, total views, and average daily views and display them in a widget or post/page.
If you’d like to read a bit more about what you can expect from the WordPress Popular Posts plugin then be sure to check out Rafay’s review on Nimbus Themes. And if you’d like to try it out for yourself then here’s a quick video tutorial to help you get started.
A Developer’s Perspective
Writing a simple function that gets your posts’ view count and displays the most popular posts is pretty simple and not something you need a plugin for. What you might need a plugin for, however, is having a handful of customization options to filter out the popular posts such as by time range, post types, excluded posts, taxonomies, specific authors, etc. and the ability to change things up whenever you’d like. The WordPress Popular Posts plugin does all of this.
In addition to this, a plugin with a clean interface makes it easy for clients to understand and tweak the settings whenever they need to. For this reason, I find it easier to install and use the WordPress Popular Posts plugin instead of attempting to code custom solutions.
Pros
- Lets you add popular posts wherever you’d like using shortcodes.
- Allows you to filter the popular posts based on a number of factors.
- Lets you exclude specific posts.
Cons
- No cons whatsoever.
An Average User’s Perspective
As an average user, I like how you can configure the WordPress Popular Posts plugin directly from its widget and don’t have to worry about messing around with complex settings – unless you want to. The plugin’s stats (views counter) is pretty accurate and displaying it is a great way of encouraging new visitors to read your popular posts.
Another feature I found myself using all the time was its filter by category functionality. What this does is it lets you display the most popular posts from a particular category. And since you can add multiple widgets on a single site (or use its shortcode feature), I was able to display the popular posts for each category I was using on my site on its own category page.
Pros
- Incredibly easy to setup and use.
- Lets you filter by categories and tags.
- Displays site statistics in the WordPress admin panel.
Cons
- No cons!
To Sum It Up
So, should you be using the WordPress Popular Posts plugin?
As a WordPress developer, if your client needs a customizable popular posts solution then you should use the WordPress Popular Posts plugin. It’s easy to use and you can play around with a few different configurations to see which one results in the best engagement results using A/B testing.
And if you’re an average user who’s looking for an easy way to showcase your blog’s most popular posts then you should definitely try the WordPress Popular Posts plugin out for yourself. It’s super easy to set up.
thank u maria