You have something of value to share, and you want share as much of it as possible. It’s one of the main motivations for writing on the web! Once a reader is on your site, a great way to make more of your content visible and easily accessible is to use one of the many clever WordPress plugins to display popular posts in the sidebar of your website.
Having popular content in your sidebar isn’t just convenient for your readers, it’s great for SEO and becoming more visible in web searches. It’s two birds with one stone, in a sense. The more interaction you get for each page from users clicking popular links, the more love you get from Google. So, let’s take a look at some WordPress plugins to display popular posts in the sidebar!
4 Neat WordPress Plugin to Display Popular Posts in the Sidebar
1) WordPress Popular Posts
WordPress Popular Posts is the behemoth of the lot, and they’re actively working for that status. They have over 200,000 active installs, are regularly updated, are active with support, and have great reviews for their size. They give you freedom of choice on how you want to measure the popularity of posts as well, which is great. You can order your posts by comments, total views, or average views per day. You also have the freedom to choose between a widget style display or embedding the display into your theme.
Features:
- Freedom to define popularity by a variety of different metrics
- Have multiple widgets throughout your site that display based on the different popularity metrics
- Define a time range to measure popularity in
- Supports inclusion of custom post types
- Thumbnail popular post display
- Multisite support
2) Top 10
Top 10 doesn’t have near as many active installs as WordPress Popular Posts, but they are no less valuable an option for your consideration. They do have more than 30,000 active users, also have great reviews for their size, and update their plugin regularly. They do give you the freedom to choose how to display the posts, and in fact this aspect is very customizable. The metric for determining popularity are page view counts. They do emphasize Top 10’s extendibility, boasting a powerful API that is fully extendable with WordPress actions and filters.
Features:
- Supports thumbnail, shortcode, and widgets displays
- Supports inclusion of custom post types
- Ability to exclude specific posts
- Inbuilt caching system helps reduce server load
- Powerful API that is fully extendable with WordPress actions and filters
- Display is wrapped in CSS classes for easy styling adjustments
3) Popular Widget
Simplicity is the name of the game with Popular Widget. If you’re looking plain and simple for a widget that’s going to display popular posts based on either number of views or number of comments, you’ve found it. The posts can be filtered by date, author, or category. Popular Widget has more than 10,000 active users, has been updated within the last year, and has good reviews for its size.
Features:
- Simple to install, simple to use
- Popularity measured by number of views or number of comments
- Filter popular posts by date, author, or category
- Thumbnail view
- Show recent comments on each article
4) Most and Least Read Posts Widget
And now something completely different! Ok not entirely, but Most and Least Read Posts Widget combines simplicity with a novel feature: it also keeps up with your least read posts. This is a great way to monitor, outside of often more complicated analytics, which posts are performing well and which aren’t. Add to that the ability to feature the ones that are hot, and you have an interesting little plugin here. It is tiny with just 3,000+ active installs, but it does receive regular updates which indicates the author is staying attentive to his users.
Features:
- Choose your date range and number of posts to show
- Excludes web crawlers from view counts
- Display view counter on each article with customizable text
- Display as widget or via shortcode
These four offerings represent a pretty good snapshot of WordPress plugins to display popular posts in the sidebar. You’ll find more out there to be sure, but it’s hard to go wrong with one of these. We hope you’ve found something useful here, and if there are others you really enjoy using, tell us about them below. Happy blogging!
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