Retaining visitors or having repeat traffic is one of the most important parts of running a successful blog or website. One of the best ways to do it is to show popular posts on your WordPress website and keep the visitors hooked.
Is displaying popular posts on your website really useful?
Popular posts are basically posts and content that is already liked by your visitors and are some of the best content on your website. This helps in engaging the future traffic and keeping them interested. It also helps in increasing the conversions and sales on your website.
Popular posts also help boost the SEO score of your posts due to internal linking which further increases traffic coming from search engines to these posts.
Below are the top 3 WordPress popular posts plugin
WordPress Popular Posts plugin lets you display popular posts on your website using widgets. These widgets are highly customizable and can be displayed anywhere on the website. The plugin has a 4.5 user rating on the WordPress plugin store and has more than 200k active installations. The plugin is also frequently updated and new features are constantly being added. Some of the features of this plugin are:
- List popular posts within a specific time range. For example, you can display posts that have been popular in the last 24 hours or the last 7 days.
- Various sorting options such as ordering the popular posts by views, comments, etc.
- Display multiple widgets of popular posts on your website with each having their own settings.
- The plugin also uses caching to reduce stress on your servers.
- The plugin supports shortcodes that can help you embed the popular posts widgets anywhere on your website.
2. Top 10 – Popular posts plugin for WordPress
Top 10 lets you display popular posts on your website based on the page views counter it creates. The plugin has a 4.5 rating on the WordPress plugins store and has more than 30k active installations. Some of its features include:
- Show popular posts based on a time range and total page views count. The plugin activates its own page views counter that tracks the page views of posts, pages and custom post types.
- The plugin supports the Gutenberg block editor. You can search for Popular Posts[Top 10] block in the block editor.
- Widgets to display popular posts in the sidebar. The widgets are customizable and lets you show daily and overall popular posts.
- You can also display thumbnails of the popular posts.
3. Trending/Popular Post Slider and Widget
This plugin allows you to display popular posts as widgets, sliders and carousels. The plugin currently has 5000+ active installations and a 4.5 rating on the WordPress plugins store. Some of its features include:
- Display popular posts on your WordPress website based on the page views count or the number of comments.
- Shortcode to display popular posts in different formats.
[wtpsw_popular_post] for showing popular posts in the slider view.
[wtpsw_carousel] for showing popular posts in the carousel view.
[wtpsw_gridbox] for showing popular posts in the grid block view.
The shortcodes also support various filters which can be found on the plugin page. - The plugin also has a PRO version which has support for Elementor, Divi and Beaver page builders. The PRO version also includes multilingual support, fully responsive design and many other features.