Display Posts
There are many ways to attract more visitors to your website. One of them is by displaying popular posts on your page!
Displaying popular posts helps your visitors find your best content and increase your page views. It is a great way to improve your SEO scores through:
- Display your popular posts with high engagements
- Internal linking to other pages
- Insert related posts in your website
- Point visitors towards your less popular posts
- Etc.
With this, you can help the visitors discover more of your content and improve the SEO scores for other articles too. Furthermore, this is a good opportunity for you to increase engagements, conversions, and sales. All of which lead visitors to sign up and help you grow your business.
In this article, we will share about the Display Posts plugin by Bill Erickson.
Getting Started
Display Posts is a WordPress plugin that allows you to display your top posts using shortcodes. The aim of this plugin is to help your visitors find your best content and let them explore other content inside your website. It is a good plugin to improve SEO scores and attract traffic to your website.
Created by Bill Erickson, the Display Posts plugin is installed by more than 100k users in WordPress. This plugin lets you choose certain posts that you want to display by creating your own custom queries using shortcode. Moreover, you can filter posts by category and display content based on share count and the number of comments.
Use the query parameters to filter the results by tag, category, post type, and more. Customize the output using the display parameters, or use a template part to match your theme exactly. Furthermore, developers can take it even further using the available filters.
Why should I use Display Posts?
Help your visitors find your best contents
If you have a website with thousands of article posts, it may be hard for visitors to find your best content. With Display Posts, you can list your most popular articles on one page and insert internal links to allow visitors to explore more posts on your website.
Generate more traffic to your website
Displaying your popular posts means that you display the most successful pieces of content that can attract many visitors. By displaying these to your visitors, it can help to generate more traffic, building social proof, and keeping your visitors stay on your website longer.
Convert your visitors
When your visitors stay on your WordPress website longer, this gives you more time to convince them to make a purchase, join your email newsletter, or take another action on your websites.
What can I do with Display Posts?
- Show a shortlist of posts on your home page.
- Create a page of Authors, with bios, and some of their most recent published works on your site.
- Highlight specific posts, like announcements, on a page.
- Add a specific list of posts to a widget in your sidebar or footer.
- so on.
What are the features of Display Posts?
Display Posts divides the shortcodes into 4 categories:
- Parameters
- Filters
- The Output Filter
- Extensions
To display a list of your recent blog posts, simply add the following shortcodes where you’d like them to appear.
Parameters
You can modify your query by passing parameters to the shortcode. There are three types of parameters:
Query parameters
Determine which posts are listed. You can query based on category, author, date, and more. Here are a few query parameter shortcodes:
- Limit to posts in the business category:
display-posts category="business"
- Limit to posts by the author bill:
display-posts author="bill"
- Show the subpages of the current page:
display-posts post_type="page" post_parent="current"
- Display posts with the highest comment count:
display-posts orderby="comment_count"
Display parameters
Determine how the posts are listed. You can include the post title, thumbnail, excerpt, and more. Here are a few display parameter shortcodes:
- Posts’ categories:
category_display="true"
- Posts’ thumbnail if it has one:
image_size="true
- Posts’ author:
Postinclude_author="true"
- Posts excerpt:
include_excerpt="true"
- Full post content:
include_content="true"
- Post date:
include_date="true"
Markup parameters
Change the underlying HTML markup, including CSS classes. Here are a few markup parameter shortcodes:
- Specify the class name:
content_class
- Change the output to a bulleted list. You can also specify “div” or “ul” as the wrapper type.
wrapper="ol"
- Custom CSS formatting:
wrapper_class
- Specify a unique ID:
wrapper_id
You can find more parameter shortcodes here.
Filters
You can modify how Display Posts works using code. You should place your customizations in a core functionality plugin or use Code Snippets.
Find the shortcodes for filters here.
The Output Filter
You can add, edit, remove, and re-order the elements that make up each post listing. If you are not satisfied with the post listing by Display Parameters, you can use the output filter to customize your post lists. There are 11 elements used for post listing with the display_posts_shortcode_output filter.
Find the shortcodes for the output filter here.
Extensions
You can add additional capabilities to your Display Posts shortcodes using several plugins. Here are the plugins you can use.
Where can I get Display Posts?
Download the Display Posts plugin here.
Then you can install it as follows:
- Upload display-posts-shortcode to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
- Activate the plugin through the Plugins menu in WordPress.
- Add the shortcode to a post or page.
How to use Display Posts?
Pros
- Very flexible
- Display any posts you want
- Detailed documentation and tutorials
Cons
- Not so beginner-friendly
- Many parameters
- No styling
Conclusion
Display Posts is a WordPress plugin to lists your contents on one page. You can use this plugin to display your most popular content to attract visitors to your website. It is one of the SEO tools that could help improve your website score in search engines. Even though it may not be suitable for beginners, you can read the detailed documentation and tutorials provided by Display Posts to help you use this plugin.
References
Explore Docs
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