How to Display Recent Posts in WordPress

Key Takeaways

this video is brought to you by monster insights hey everyone in this video I'll walk you through how to display recent posts on your WordPress website and we'll cover five different methods so you can pick the one that works best for you adding a recent post area to your website is a great way to showcase to your readers different articles that they might find interesting so if you're ready let's dive in the first method is by using WordPress latest posts with the WordPress block to do that we'll head over you can use this in a post or a page so go to pages I'll click add new and I'll create a new page for this just to show you what this looks like and then once you want to add the recent posts go to where you want it to be and do a search for latest posts this is what we want and now we have it here now once we have this block here we can come over to the right and make some changes you can choose to do post content if you want excerpt or a full post you can also do a slider on just how much content will be there and you see it changing in real time just to give you an idea you can also choose to display the post date if you want to display the post image and how big you want that to be and where you want it to go so you have a lot of features to choose from you can also choose to sort by oldest to newest or vice versa and you can also filter on either just one particular category or if you want to filter on the or if you want to just do all categories then you can do that as well and then you can choose how many items you want to showcase in your recent post area and then you can even add a little bit of CSS class then that would just be for making it look however you want it to look so that's one way once you're done with that we can click publish and then we can see what this looks like and that's particularly to your area obviously we don't have feature thumbnails on each post and so that's why it looks like that now method two is by using a widget so let's go back to our WordPress dashboard and we'll go to appearance we and you normally put this in say a sidebar area or because this theme only has footer areas I'm going to put recent posts in one of my footer areas so on the left you want to scroll to find recent posts widget and then we left click drag this up and choose where you want it to go put it over in my footer 2 area you don't have as many options to choose from with this so you just want to add your title decide how many posts to show and whether or not you want to show the post date and then click Save and now you see your recent posts over here with the title and the post date and that looks pretty good but method 3 takes it a little bit further because if you want to add the thumbnail image then you can do that as well for method 3 we're actually going to install a plug-in and the plug-in is called recent posts widget with thumbnails plug-in so to do that we want to go to plugins add new and we're searching for recent posts widget with thumbnails this is the one we want so let's go ahead and install it and make sure you also stick around to activate it as well now that it's activated we can head back over to our widgets area and now we should have a new widget called recent posts with thumbnails there we go just the one we want so let's click left click drag it up and I'm going to put it next to the other one that we did and you see with this one we have quite a bit more options to choose from how many posts you want to show if you want them to open in a new window if you want to do random order if you don't want to show the current one which is kind of important which is kind of smart because they're probably already on the most recent one and you can also choose whether or not to show the title you want to show the post author categories several things to choose from scrolling all the way down you can choose to show the thumbnail and how you want it to show so several more options for you to choose from we're gonna click Save and now let's go back to our site and refresh it so we can see the recent posts with thumbnail and again you see this and you can make all the changes that you want but now it shows the featured image as well for any posts that I have a featured image for method 4 is great if you're still using the classic editor and this will allow you to add recent posts using a shortcode it is also using a plugin so to do that let's head over to our plugins area add new and we're looking for display post this is the one we want so let's go ahead and install it and activate it and then I'll show you how to add the shortcode to display the recent posts great now it's activated you see it here I'm gonna go back to that pages and I'm going to add that there I'm gonna open up the recent post page and this is the classic editor that were in and then all you want to do is paste in display post that is the basic shortcode that you can use and then you can also check out the documentation where there's several different short codes that you can choose from and now you see the recent posts are in here using these shortcode then you can check out the documentation to see all the different other ways to display your recent posts as well and then method 5 is if you want to dig into the code then you can check out the written article that we've that we have in the description below where you can copy this bit of code and put it in your theme so that you can display the recent code posts on any poster page where you add this bit of code to your theme area and then one of the best ways to test out and see how all of this content is doing is by installing a plug-in called monster insights with monster insights you see exactly how your website is doing in the eyes of Google Analytics from here you can see your traffic your best-performing pages as well as your top performing affiliate links and so much more to get started just head over to monster insights calm and make sure you use promo code WP be VIP to get the best discount on monster insights and thanks for watching