6 Best WordPress Popular Posts Plugins
It’s natural to want to show off your most popular content, so why not push it right into your viewers’ line of sight? Some of your blogposts will get more views than others, so it’s a good idea to encourage people to read your most popular posts and get very impressive page views on those few posts. The process of creating a popular posts widget can be hard for some, so developers have made it easier with a wide selection of plugins for WordPress popular posts. Here’s a list from us at WP Carers of the 6 Best WordPress Popular Posts Plugins.
Image: WordPress.org
1.Top 10 – WordPress Popular Posts Plugin
Despite its name, this plugin lets you show as many popular posts to your viewers as you’d like. With Top 10, you can display your post’s views, author, thumbnails and an excerpt of the text. The plugin comes with a configurable widget included that can be added to your sidebar and features your most popular posts. Additional features include shortcodes, thumbnail support, admin interface, extendable code and integration with all major caching plugins.
Image: WordPress.org
2. WordPress Popular Posts – WordPress Popular Post
It’s clear WordPress Popular Posts is an incredibly popular popular posts plugin due to the fact it has over 200,000 active installs! This plugin has a widget for popular posts which can be put in any widget-ready area of your WordPress site. It has plenty of of customisable options such as time range, post types, categories and authors. You also have the choice of whether to display a thumbnail or not and if you choose to, you can select the thumbnail size. In addition, you can check your popular posts statistics in the plugin’s settings page.
Image: WordPress.org
3. Popular Widget – WordPress Popular Posts
Popular Widget allows you to display your most popular posts using a widget. This widget is incredibly powerful, it lets you display posts by most commented, recent posts, recent comments and tags. The plugin also has good CSS which manages the display and the plugin supports custom post types and post thumbnails. You can choose to filter out categories and custom taxonomies when displaying posts and you can sort them by number of views or number of visits.
Image: WordPress.org
4. Popularity Posts Widget – WordPress Popular Posts Plugin
This plugin is simpler than the other popular posts plugins, for example, it doesn’t have a dedicated settings page and has fewer options. Popularity Posts Widget works with a powerful widget which can be positioned via the drag and drop interface and has easily configurable settings. This plugin also has a category filter, allowing you to exclude posts from certain categories. There are options to adjust the number of posts displayed, time range, whether to show post views and comment count.
Image: Codecanyon.com
5. Top Stories – WordPress Popular Post
Unlike the other plugins on this list, Top Stories isn’t free, but if you want to push your best content forward, the $15 will be worth it. This plugin is aesthetically beautiful, it displays large thumbnails, bright colours, smart typography, tinted thumbnails, custom colours for each post and 18 built-in animations. The plugin is also very customisable with full mobile responsiveness.
Image: WordPress.org
6. Stylish Popular Posts – WordPress Popular Posts
Critics have said that Stylish Popular Posts puts style over substance due to its simple processing and lack of customisation. However, style-wise, it’s great. The popular posts section displays chunky thumbnails to fill the widget area and a small coloured circle shows the popularity ranking of each post. Additional features include translations and Regenerate Thumbnails integration.