Free customizable WordPress widget plugin for top and popular posts
WordPress Popular Posts is a free plugin that adds a widget to the WordPress console that displays the top posts to readers on your website, much like MonsterInsights, WP-PostRatings, and Display Posts. You don’t need to settle for only one when you can customize different widgets for placement across your pages. It also lets you present your posts as thumbnails, giving that extra touch to the site’s appearance.
If you want a backstage view of how well your posts are doing, you’ll find a statistics area in the dashboard. You can order the list according to different categories, depending on which aspect you’re analyzing. The plugin can also improve site loading speed and performance by caching posts and pages
Display popular posts on your site
WordPress has several widgets pre-installed in the admin section. While there’s already an option to show recent posts, you can’t do much customizing, and it doesn’t feature the best posts. WordPress Popular Posts adds a new widget to fill this gap, presenting your audience with the top articles for them to peruse. It saves you time creating shortcodes that do the same function, which helps if you have no coding knowledge.
Customize themes and widgets
Instead of simply having the default theme when showing the articles, WordPress Popular Posts lets you change the appearance. You can also have different settings for multiple widgets if you want them to act and look uniquely on any of your pages. If you have knowledge of HTML markup, you can also customize the layout.
View the statistics
While the above features mainly focus on what your readers see, WordPress Popular Posts also reveals how many views you’re getting for articles on your site. There’s a central dashboard showing you which ones are doing the best so you can adjust your strategy if needed.
Show your viewers the best posts
WordPress Popular Posts showcases all the best articles so that readers can target their attention on them, delivering more views. It’s an excellent mechanism to improve views on your campaigns, and you can change how or where they appear at any time.
The only concern is that there are so many features linked to the setup, new site owners may feel overwhelmed at first. However, you’ll get the hang of it shortly after testing it out.