You’ve got a lot of great articles on your site, but they’re from last year, or last month, or last week, and they’re no longer on the front page of your site. You don’t want visitors to miss them. What to do?
Well, one option is to install a Wordpress plugin that lists the most popular posts on your site and add this list to your front page. I like the Wordpress Popular Posts plugin by Hector Cabrera, which allows you to do some basic configuring of how you’d like the popular posts to be determined (total views, number of comments, or average daily views) and within a time range (all-time, today, last week, last month, or last year), as well as the number of posts you’d like to display.
Another option is to use a Wordpress theme that includes the option for one or more featured posts that stick on your front page. Some themes’ default featured post is the most recent post. Instead, you’re looking for a theme that allows you to pick and choose which posts you’d like to feature, and this is usually done via an established category called something on the lines of Featured or Featured Article, and of course will depend on that particular theme’s options.
Yet another option that I like a lot involves adding a snazzy archive page to the site. Although it won’t be shown on your home page, you can name the page something more click-worthy than “Archives”, such as “All Articles” or “See All Posts”. A typical archive page is handy, but the Snazzy Archives plugin really jazzes the page up. You can set it up to show article snippets and image previews–and we all know that readers love images. Setting up this plugin is easy. There are two different layouts to choose from, and once you’ve chosen your options, you simply add a new page to your site (named Archives, or All Articles, or whatever you’d like) and place [snazzy-archives] into the page body. That’s it! Play around with it a little in order to make it fit your content the way you’d like it to. The only possible problem with this plugin arises when your theme requires you to add your image to a post through a Custom Field. Unless there is another image in the post besides that one, the Archives page won’t show the image.
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