Especially for magazines or blog sites, we need to display WordPress recent posts with thumbnails on our site to make the website more readable and attractive to the audience. The benefit of displaying recent posts on websites is to navigate visitors easily to the newly published posts.
Recent posts refer to the recently published or modified posts.
In the WordPress industry, thumbnails/Featured images are the types of images that represent a single Post, Page, or Custom Post Type.
Usually, you need to do coding or hire a developer to display the recent post with thumbnails in WordPress. The process is both time-consuming and costly. Also, if you hire a developer you need to depend on him/her for any sort of update and further modification.
To ease this problem today I will recommend you a very unique and useful plugin named PostX. With the help of this plugin, you can show recent posts with thumbnails anywhere on your site.
PostX offers an advanced query builder through which you can easily display recent posts on your site. Let’s discuss how to present WordPress’s recent posts with thumbnails.
Advantages of Displaying Recent Posts on Blogsite
- More Traffics: Recent Posts will help you to bring more traffics from homepages to blog posts.
- Higher Average Session: Visitors will easily be navigated to the newly published posts that will increase the site’s average session duration(the average session duration of a site is 2 to 3 minutes).
- Optimal Bounce Rate: When visitors easily get the newly published posts they tend to spend much time reading the blogs. It will decrease the bounce rate for a website. As well, it will help to gain an optimal bounce rate (the optimal bounce rate for a site is 26% to 40 %).
- Higher Ranking Possibilities: Lower bounce rate and a higher average session will amplify your ranking possibilities.
Following Steps for Displaying Recent Posts with Thumbnails
WordPress users can display recent posts by using the recent posts widget. But, in the default recent posts widget, you cannot show thumbnails. To show thumbnails with recent posts, you need to install another supportive plugin eg. PostX.
First of all, you need to install and activate the PostX plugin. You will get the PostX plugin easily in the WordPress Directory. Here, you need to go to the WordPress plugins option and search PostX.
In the PostX settings option, you will get options for Query. Under the query option, you will get the Quick Query feature which helps you to select recent/latest posts, popular posts, related posts, most commented posts, etc.
Here, I will discuss the steps to display recent posts with thumbnails on the homepage.
Recent Posts with Thumbnails on the Homepage
The home page is considered the main page of the site where the visitor land first. Adding a recent posts section makes the homepage more readable and attractive.
On the WordPress default home page, the recent/latest posts display by default. But, on a custom home page, we need to show it manually. Here, I will guide you to the steps to show recent posts on a custom home page.
Step 01
If you forget/ do not know how to create the homepage for your site you need not worry. I will give you a quick recap now. First, go to the WordPress Page section, and click on Add New. Name the page as Home. Then from the right-sided page settings option, go to the Template option. Select PostX Template and now click on Edit. After clicking on Edit, you will now direct to the Template Editor Page.
Now, we need to separate the page from other blog pages. To create the page as a home page, first, go to the Reading option from the settings. Then select A Static Page. Next, select the Home Page and save the changes.
Step 02
Go to your WordPress homepage. You can customize the homepage directly by importing the starter packs or by manually adding different post blocks (post grid blocks, post listing, post slider blocks, etc.).
Step 03
After the customization of the homepage, you need to go to the settings and click on the query option. Here, you will get e Quick Query option. You can select the latest posts by published date/ last modified date.
Recent Posts Widget with Thumbnails on the Sidebar
Sidebar– A sidebar is a column that is placed to the right or left of a webpage’s main content area. They are frequently used to show various types of supplementary information to users.
You can also show the recent posts with thumbnails on your sidebar through the help of PostX plugin.
First, go to the Appearance option and select Widget. Here, you will get the main sidebar option. From the main sidebar option, you can select your desired PostX blocks. Then, go to the blocks settings options, and go to the Query option. Here, you will get a quick query option through which you can show your recent posts/latest posts on your sidebar.
Conclusion
I believe this writing is helpful to you and you can now easily show recent posts with thumbnails on any of your custom homepages or as a sidebar on your blogsite. A special thanks to the PostX developer team, who helps to display this essential feature in a simple way. If you have any further queries regarding recent posts, do not forget to comment below.
