Recent Posts widget – pros, cons, ideal number?
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The more I think about the Recent Posts widget, the more dithery I become, so I thought I’d ask for more informed opinions here. a) What are the advantages and disadvantages of having the recent posts widget in the sidebar, and b) if you have the recent posts widget, what is the ideal number — or is there an ideal number. I presume it’s more than the number of posts you have visible on the blog page, but how many is enough & when is it too much?
Thanks for your thoughts on this!
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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I’ve dithered too, so I’ll be interested in the responses. Currently I don’t have it it the sidebar, but I’ve put it in, taken it out, put it back, changed the number – you name it, I’ve done it!
In the end I went with an Archives page and the “Top Posts & Pages” widget in the sidebar.
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You MUST have it. You MUST. If you have no other widgets, you MUST have Recent Posts and Recent Comments.
I’m very, very serious. People hate to scroll like you wouldn’t believe. I’ve had good success with five entries in the widget, but the main thing is don’t make it too long. If you have a theme like Inuit Types or automatically truncate posts so that three or so are always visible on the front page, it’s less critical to use the widget, and you need to make sure it shows more posts than readers can actually see without scrolling, but other than that it’s pretty wide open.
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If you use Top Posts and Pages instead, none of your new posts will ever have a chance to make that list.
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OOPS! That’s wrong. I no longer use a Recent Posts widget because my I have 8 excerpts from my Recent Posts on my front page. I also provide a Sitemap to all posts published in the blog.
I do use the Recent Comments Widget.
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But you’re using Inuit Types, which displays posts in a whole new way. People can see ALL your recent posts immediately. Those themes are very hot right now, but not very widely-used on WP.com, so they constitute a special case.
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Okay, so what’s a good number? Does it depend on how frequently you post?
Since switching themes and actually putting a bit more thought into the posting, I’ve tended to use the “more” tag a lot — unless it’s a very short post. So I’ve been keeping between 6 & 8 posts on the page (again, dithery!), and I had had the “recent posts” widget set at 12, but that seemed a lot. On the other hand, I’ve been trying to post more frequently lately, so maybe 12 isn’t a lot, since some of the recent posts do fall off the front page sooner.
Oddly (or maybe not-so-oddly!), since switching to Coraline and simultaneously rethinking both the way I use and place widgets & the way that I use tags & cats, the number of visitors I get through search engines has probably tripled, and it had already been steadily increasing. In addition, Google is crawling my site more frequently and crawling more pages — I don’t know if this is merely coincidental, or not, since they apparently also have recently made some kind of changes to how they decide what to crawl. (I’ve only recently become interested in search engines and such, so I don’t know much about it — and I still write posts for myself & for my “core” audience, small though it may be, but I’m trying also to think of how to make complete strangers feel “at home” on the site, too.) Anyway, that was OT . . .
I really appreciate the input & the varied opinions! It helps when I’m thinking about the site.
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BTW, just because the number of visitors through the search engines has tripled doesn’t mean that I get a lot of visitors! LOL! But previously, the majority of my visitors came to me through links on other sites (where I’m active & sorta known), and I imagine that many of them were repeat visitors — and that was and is fine, since I created my blog originally for the people who visit me on the other sites in order to give them “extras,” essentially.
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Google is crawling your site more frequently in response to the changes you’re making: it needs to keep an updated site map, so every time you change your site Google will check it out.
The maximum number of posts from your blog anyone can be looking at without scrolling is two, so I’d put the Recent Posts widget right up at the top of the sidebar, and put maybe 5 or 6 posts in it. I have ten posts in my Best Of Raincoaster widget, and they hardly ever get clicks. They got more when it was five.
But it should always show all the posts you’ve made TODAY, plus at least one more.
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Huh — I didn’t realize that! (About Google & site changes.) But I don’t think I’m gonna drive myself nuts trying to make changes just for Google, only if they’re ones that make sense for the site & users. (Although I do admit to a wee bit of irrationality occasionally, and sometimes do things just ’cause I like them even if I haven’t got a good reason for it — other than “it’s pretty” or something like that! lol!)
I’ll try moving the widgets around a bit. Right now I have my top posts & pages widget down in the bottom in the footer, but I like them there, and I think I’ll keep them — they do seem to generate some hits. The top clicks are harder to measure, since of course the url might not necessarily tell a casual reader what the content of a page was, though I do think I’ll keep it.
I doubt that I will generally do more than a post a day (maybe four or five a week), though lately, I have done more for a combination of reasons — time, events, interest, yada yada.
Should I try to keep the number of listings in the recent posts widget at least a couple over what shows on the front page? I’m leaning that way, but if there’s a good reason only to have the same number as show on the front page, I’d like to think about that.
Thanks, raincoaster! Appreciate the help from you! And the advice from timethief, too — it’s good to get the different takes on the question.
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I think you need to take into account Mark’s advice from a few months back that the optimum number of posts to have on the front page is less than ten. In fact, it was five. If you have that and the Recent Posts widget shows maybe seven, you’re golden.
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@raincoaster, given your “Musts” in CAPS I’ve put the Recent Widget back, but my latests posts always make the “Top Posts and Pages” widget.
Now I have both.
Perhaps my Recent Comments widget is a little long?
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I’m at 6 now, I think, so I’ll drop that to five & see how that goes, and then fiddle with the recent posts widget a bit — I think it has too many now. I want to say 10, but I’ve been changing it from between 8 & 12 lately. (I think 12 was way too much.)
Thanks for the advice!
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If your latest posts always make Top Posts widget, you’re doing really really REALLY well. It means your blog is growing at a very good rate. Either that or you can count all your hits without taking off your shoes and socks.
Your Recent Comments widget can NEVER be too long, but it’s too low down the page. People will come to your site to see if you’ve replied and they might not scroll down very far.
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I’m always barefoot in the house. :)
I wouldn’t say it is growing – I think it has a loyal regular readership who come and read the Most Recent, which pops them into the Top Posts. Then often I end up with really old posts making the Top Posts due to search engines sending people to areas they were searching for. My daily view count is fairly constant, whereas “growing” implies increasing to me.
Broken heels seems particularly popular from time to time. I’ve never googled for anything about broken heels myself, but clearly people do! LOL
@mmadfan – glad to see I’m not the only one who fiddles!
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I don’t think making a choice on how many posts to display on a front page based on numbers is necessarily the way to go. It really depends on the length of the posts. On some blogs there can be 5 short posts that do not cause me as a reader to scroll and scroll. On others 1 post can be so long that I have to scroll and in those cases it maybe wise if the blogger chooses to display only that one post on the front page. I have changed mine from time to time.
Though I use Inuit Types that automatically truncates posts on both of my blogs I frequently choose to select an excerpt that’s not at the beginning of the posts and in that case I enter it into the excerpt box. (Yes, Inuit Types has a live excerpt box).
On my personal blog I use a layout choice that does not include images in the excerpts but by using the excerpt box below the editor I can insert one. I do not use the “featured images” function at all. The reason I am mentioning this at all is because some bloggers don’t recognized that every image even avatars slows down page loading time down. So I do not display gravatars in the Recent Comments widgets.
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Interesting, timethief.
I think that maybe I might let the look & length of the front page & its posts help me to decide whether to change the settings or keep them as is, but without becoming obsessed with tweaking it every time I post something. I think, too, that having some bit of “sameness” and familiarity is good when people return to the site, so even though changing the number of posts displayed isn’t a radical change, probably moving between two posts and twelve & everything in between all the time might just feel a bit weird to a visitor who visits often.
At first, I was keeping most images below the “more” cut line, but then I felt that the page looked uninteresting and it was harder to distinguish the posts, so I’ve been keeping some of them above it. But I always use my image manip program to optimize them so that they’re small but still look decent for the purpose they’re put to — if I have some great graphic that I want to “showcase,” I’ll keep it below the more or maybe reduce the number of posts displaying until that one drops off the front page.
@teamoyeniyi:
After stepping in a cold wet hairball upchucked by a cat in the middle of the night (either the stepping or the upchucking!), I now keep flip-flops by my bed, but I also prefer bare feet, except when it’s cold. Then mocs are my best friends! ;)Broken heels . . . nope, can’t say that I’ve ever googled that, either — but maybe if I had one? . . . Having a spinal cord problem had me searching some pretty strange terms at one time!
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