WordPress Popular Posts

WordPress Popular Posts is a highly customizable WordPress plugin that displays your most popular posts in any widget area. It comes packed with several options and layout choices, making your job easier.

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What We Think:

90%

Very highly recommended!

WordPress Popular Posts: A Comprehensive Review

WordPress Popular Posts is a free WordPress plugin that allows users to display their most popular blog posts in a highly customizable widget. It gives site administrators an insight into which posts are performing best and helps them to better market their content. With this plugin, website visitors are able to get a better understanding about what topics they should explore on your website. Additionally, this plugin can be used to measure the performance of your content with helpful metrics that can help guide decisions about how to best grow an audience.

WordPress Popular Posts: Breakdown

WordPress Popular Posts is a straightforward plugin that is easy to install and configure in a matter of minutes. Once installed and set up, the plugin allows users to create a widget that shows the most popular content on a website, based on criteria such as most viewed, commented on, or shared content. The widget can easily be customized and adapted to perfectly match the rest of a website’s design. Options for styling, content selection, and layout can be tweaked to create an effective visual impression of the most popular content.

The plugin keeps track of post views and comments, as well as other user activities such as time spent on each page and outbound link clicks. This data allows for comprehensive measurements of the effectiveness of the content strategy and website performance. The metrics can then be used to help craft clever marketing plans that will maximize the impact of the website.

WordPress Popular Posts has advanced features that can boost the performance of websites even further. Options such as caching, which stores the numbers of views in a database to improve performance and privacy; shortcodes and template tags, which allow more flexibility in how the popular posts widget is displayed; and the Recent Popular Posts Widget, which allows for a more flexible display of the most popular content, are just a few of the fully-featured capabilities of the plugin.

Pros of Using WordPress Popular Posts

Easy to Setup and Configuration: WordPress Popular Posts is an incredibly simple plugin to set up. All you need to do is install the plugin, set up the settings (if you want to customize the display) and make sure that it is active. You can then place the WordPress Popular Posts widget onto your WordPress theme or onto any widget-enabled areas of your website.

Gives You Control Over the Display: With WordPress Popular Posts you get a lot of control over the display of the posts. You can decide which post types you would like to include in the display, you can also adjust the number of posts to be displayed, and you can even filter out particular posts from appearing. You can choose to have titles only, thumbnails, excerpts, stats or all of the above shown. You have great control over which posts are displayed and how they are presented on your website.

Supports Multiple Databases: WordPress Popular Posts supports not only the standard WordPress database but also other databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL and even SQLite. This means that you can use the plugin with other types of websites and databases too, as long as they are compatible with WordPress.

Provides You With Usefu Statistics: Once you have activated the WordPress Popular Posts plugin, you can see how popular the posts are on your website. It tracks the number of views, shares, comments, and likes each post gets, so you can easily see which posts are the most popular and display them on your homepage.

Highly Customizable: WordPress Popular Posts is highly customizable, you can add custom CSS classes, custom HTML tags, set the order of posts, the limit of posts per page or per tag and even customize the content that is displayed. With this level of customization, you can make sure that your popular posts stand out from the rest and are always displayed in the right way.

Cons of Using WordPress Popular Posts

Lack of Options: One of the primary cons of using the WordPress Popular Posts plugin is that the amount of options you have is limited. While you can change the presentation of the posts in some ways, there are no options to customize the colors, font size, text alignment, etc. Additionally, you can’t sort the posts in categories or tags, which can add a layer of complexity that many WordPress users do not need. Lastly, you cannot limit or exclude certain posts from appearing in the plugin, which could be problematic if you want to feature certain posts over others.

Security Risks: When using WordPress Popular Posts, there is always a potential for security risks. Especially if you have unchecked code in the plugin, you’re leaving your site open to vulnerabilities. There have been a couple of high-profile cases of people getting hacked as a result of selecting poorly coded WordPress plugins, and this is something that you should take into account when evaluating the security of your website. Additionally, the plugin has not been updated in over two years, which means it is potentially more vulnerable to security threats.

Lack Of Customization: Another big disadvantage of using WordPress Popular Posts is the lack of customization you can perform on the plugin. You are limited to the layouts provided by the plugin, and you won’t be able to tailor the visuals to your theme or company guidelines. Additionally, the plugin does not support any shortcodes, which could be helpful in terms of customizing the style and layout of the posts.

Not Responsive: Unfortunately, the WordPress Popular Posts plugin is not responsive, so it will not scale to different mobile devices. This is a huge disadvantage for a plugin that is meant to be used to display content on the web. Additionally, the plugin does not have any options for touch-optimized navigation, which is increasingly important for website users.

Poor Documentation: Finally, another disadvantage of using the WordPress Popular Posts plugin has to do with the lack of quality documentation. While there are some basic instructions, they are not very detailed or comprehensive, and do not offer much help to novice WordPress users. Additionally, support is limited and any help you do find is of questionable quality.

90% Very highly recommended!

In conclusion

WordPress Popular Posts is the perfect plugin for WordPress users looking to gain an understanding of which posts are the most popular on their website. By tracking post views, comments, and other user activities, the plugin gives website administrators valuable insights into the success of their website. With thoroughly configurable controls, administrators can make sure that the popular posts widget fits perfectly into their website’s design, all while allowing visitors to easily explore the content they may find most interesting. Overall, WordPress Popular Posts is an incredibly useful plugin that can help turn any website into a thriving online hub of activity and interest.

Plugin Specifications

Version: 6.3.4
Last Updated: 8 months ago
Installs: 200,000+
WP Version: 5.3+
Tested Until: 6.4.2
PHP Version: 7.2 or higher

Use Case Examples

Show post titles and featured images on home page
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WordPress Popular Posts makes it easy to show post titles and featured images on your home page to highlight the most popular posts from your blog. This plugin provides an easy way to display the most-viewed content on your website, allowing visitors to quickly and easily identify the posts that are the most popular on your site. In addition to the titles and featured images, the plugin also allows you to display the author, date, and number of comments associated with each post, so you can provide additional context for your readers. This helps visitors quickly find the most interesting content that is related to their interests.
Create a widget to display popular posts
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Highlight popular content in post navigation
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Instantly access popular posts from the dashboard
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Simplify analyzing website’s most popular content
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