How Many Posts Should You Display on Your Home Page?
Last week I wrote about a simple tweak you could insert into the main “while post loop” of your theme’s index.php file. The tweak outlined simple steps for adding a counter to the primary display loop in order to insert a conditional “if statement” which helped determine whether to display the full post or just the excerpt. While the extra code provides greater display flexibility, it doesn’t do much to address a bigger question I believe needs to be asked: How many posts should you display on your home page?
Your input needed
The answer to the question I am posing is mostly personal preference: Essentially there is no “right answer.” Therefore, I want to encourage everyone to consider the question presented, take the poll, and post a comment presenting their reason for their selection. As an extra incentive to participate, I’ll do what I’ve done in the past with similar poll based articles: I’ll write a summary post next week and list all of the answers along with links back to the author’s blog.
Before you answer
Before you answer the question consider what others are doing in the blog-o-sphere with respect to main page post display:
- At Bookmarkbliss.com Stark only displays his most recent post, and previous articles are listed in the left hand navigation section.
- At Technosailor.com Aaron has a similar approach: display only the most recent post, as an excerpt, and list other recent posts in a right hand navigation section.
- Daniel at DailyBlogTips.com displays excerpts of the 7 most recent posts.
- And I see David at davidairey.co.uk displays the 4 most recent posts in their entirety.
That’s a fairly good representation of what others are doing with their blogs. What are doing? If you’ve just gone with the WordPress default display setting of 10, ask you’re whether that really makes sense. If not, how many posts should you display? Please consider the question, take the poll, and let me know your thoughts.
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Filed under: Blogging Related
Just voted “3″. It is better if in general if the length of you post can match the length of your sidebar. so.. maybe it is best to have recent post in full, and the other 2 in excerpt. Just my opinion.
I voted for three too, and will probably drop the number on mine from 4 to 3. I list the latest 10 in my sidebar, which gets around the issue of people not visiting for a few days.
One thing I’d like to do is list the first post in its entirety, and the next two as excerpts, like Reztar suggests. Not sure how yet.
Thanks for the mention!
Hey David and Reztar, thanks for the comments and taking the poll. Not sure if you guys missed it or not, but I did previously write a post that outlined the steps needed to automatically display the full text of the first post and then excerpts for all remaining posts. It does require a little theme editing but the changes are very minor. Check it out if you have the time: http://www.techtraction.com/2007/08/22/full-post-or-excerpt-can-you-display-both/
I like the idea of having an entire month’s worth of entries available. That way if someone is away they can scroll through the entire month. Perhaps you could have a summary post at the end of each month as a way to highlight the main topics of focus.
These topics are a little too detailed and dry. What other topics do people want to hear about?
I’m experimenting with 5 and 10 on different blogs. In all cases the first post is a full post display with the remaining 4 or 9 being excerpts. I do have an idea I plan to test soon though where I’ll be displaying the first 10 as excerpts and then the most recent 5 from each category as linked titles, each category in it’s own position. Obviously i need to build up enough content and post pretty frequently for this trial.
I personally find a page with only 3 articles on it just as annoying as one with 30.
It should be long enough that you can scroll down a bit, but not too far. I say 7-8 articles per page depending on how much article you show before the more tag.
Thanks Dane and Mlankton for your input. Greatly appreciated.