How to Display Recent Posts in WordPress

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How to Display Recent Posts in WordPress

Are you looking to display your most recent posts in WordPress? While your homepage automatically displays your latest posts, you may want to showcase them in other areas of your website, like in a sidebar widget.

In this article, we’ll show you how to display recent posts in WordPress, step-by-step.

Why Display Recent Posts in WordPress?

There are a few reasons you may want to display your recent posts in WordPress.

For one, it helps keep your website fresh and up-to-date. If you have a blog, then your latest articles should be easy for users to find.

Secondly, it encourages users to explore more of your website. By featuring your most recent posts prominently on your website, you can encourage users to click through to other pages and articles that they may find interesting.

Lastly, it can help with your website’s SEO. Google and other search engines crawl websites and index new content. If you have a blog, featuring your latest articles prominently on your website can help Google index them faster, and ultimately help you rank higher in search results.

Now that we’ve covered why you may want to display recent posts in WordPress, let’s take a look at how to do it.

How to Display Recent Posts in WordPress

There are a few different ways that you can display recent posts in WordPress. We’ll cover three of the most popular methods below.

Method 1: Display Recent Posts in WordPress Using a Plugin

The easiest way to display recent posts in WordPress is to use a plugin. While there are many plugins available that can help you display recent posts, we recommend using the Advanced Recent Posts Widget plugin. It’s a free plugin that’s regularly updated and is easy to use.

Once you’ve installed and activated the plugin, you can configure the widget by going to Appearance » Widgets in your WordPress dashboard. Find the ‘Advanced Recent Posts’ widget and drag it into your sidebar.

On the widget settings screen, you can give your widget a title and choose how many posts you want to display. You can also choose which metadata to show, like the post author, date, or category.

When you’re finished, click on the ‘Save’ button to store your widget settings. Your recent posts should now be visible in the sidebar of your website.

Method 2: Display Recent Posts in WordPress Manually

If you’re comfortable working with code, then you can display recent posts in WordPress by adding a few lines of code to your website.

First, you’ll need to create a custom widget area. You can do this by adding the following code to your child theme’s functions.php file or a site-specific plugin.

function my_recent_posts_widget_area() {

register_sidebar( array(

‘name’ => __( ‘Recent Posts Widget Area’, ‘textdomain’ ),

‘id’ => ‘recent-posts-widget-area’,

‘description’ => __( ‘This widget area will display your recent posts.’, ‘textdomain’ ),

‘before_widget’ => ‘

‘,

‘before_title’ => ‘

‘,

‘after_title’ => ‘

‘,

Assuming you want a WordPress blog:

In WordPress, the most recent posts are displayed on the home page by default. If you want to display recent posts somewhere else on your website, you can use the WordPress function called WP_Query.

Here is how you would use WP_Query to display the five most recent posts:

$args = array(

‘posts_per_page’ => 5,

‘post_status’ => ‘publish’,

‘orderby’ => ‘date’,

‘order’ => ‘DESC’

);

$recent_posts = new WP_Query( $args );

if ( $recent_posts->have_posts() ) :

while ( $recent_posts->have_posts() ) : $recent_posts->the_post();

echo ‘

‘ . get_the_title() . ‘

‘;

endwhile;

wp_reset_postdata();

else :

echo ‘

No posts found

‘;

endif;

?>

This code fragment would display a list of the five most recent posts, with the most recent post at the top.