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Free WordPress Plugin For Popular Posts
Are you looking for a way to show popular posts on your WordPress website?
Displaying popular posts helps your visitors find your best content and increase your page views. It’s also a great way to interlink your pages to boost SEO.
In this article, we will share the best popular posts plugins for WordPress.
best popular post plugins for wordpress
Why Use a WordPress Popular Posts Plugin?
Using a WordPress popular posts plugin helps you point users towards the articles that other users already found helpful.
Popular posts are usually your most successful content, which means they more likely to increase user engagement, conversions, and sales.
They are also a good opportunity for internal linking to your other less popular articles. This improves the SEO score for other articles and helps users discover more content.
You can create highly engaging funnels using popular posts, related posts, and conversion optimization tools. All of which lead users to sign up and help you grow your business.
That being said, let’s take a look at some of the best popular post plugins for WordPress that you can on your website.
- MonsterInsights
monsterInsights
MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress used by over 2 million websites. It lets you properly setup Google Analytics without editing code or hiring a developer.
They have the best Popular Posts feature which allows you to show your popular articles anywhere on your WordPress site. You can use also use Inline Popular Posts to show articles inside your content.
MonsterInsights Inline Popular Posts
If you want to show articles in the sidebar or at the end of your content, you can select the Popular Post Widget.
MonsterInsights even lets you display your top-performing products anywhere on your eCommerce store.
MonsterInsights Popular Products for WooCommerce
The plugin offers different themes to choose from, and you can customize the design by changing the title color, size, label color, border, and more.
MonsterInsights Popular Post Templates
You can sort your popular posts based on comments, share count, or manually select posts that will randomly rotate in the widget.
If you have custom dimensions set up like post type, then MonsterInsights will automatically pick the top 5 posts from Google Analytics from the past 30 days and show them as popular posts.
Pros: MonsterInsights offers lots of options to display popular posts. You can select different themes, layouts, styling, and customize each popular post widget. It can automatically determine popular posts and show them on your website.
Cons: To get powerful features like eCommerce tracking, conversion tracking, and custom dimensions, you’ll need the MosterInsights Pro plan.
- WordPress Popular Posts
wordpress popular posts
WordPress Popular Posts plugin is one of the most downloaded popular posts plugin on the market with over 300,000+ active installs. It allows you to show popular posts with many different conditions.
You can show recently trending articles by selecting a date range. You can also show most commented or most viewed articles.
It is multi-widget capable, which means you can add the same widget multiple times into the same or different sidebar. You can apply your own custom CSS, show post thumbnails, excerpts, author, comment count, number of views, and more.
Pros: WordPress Popular Posts is a powerful plugin with all the options you would need to display your popular posts. Support for custom post types and the ability to add the widget multiple times allows you to create a different set of popular views, e.g., Popular Posts, Popular Reviews, etc.
Cons: The plugin creates two extra tables in the database to store popular posts data and cache. While some people might argue that it is a better approach to keep this data out of default WordPress tables, others may find it database intensive. Also there’s no option to connect with real analytics.
- Top 10 – Popular posts plugin for WordPress
top 10 popular posts plugin for wordpress
Top 10 Popular posts plugin for WordPress is another strong candidate in our list of the best popular posts plugins.
As far as the features are concerned, it matches WordPress Popular Posts and even adds some more features. Top 10 also comes with a highly configurable widget and shortcodes.
Despite the name, you can choose to display any number of popular posts. It allows you to select a date range to choose from. You can show post views, author, post summary or excerpt, and post thumbnails in the popular posts list.
Top 10 comes with a built-in caching system to make it less resource intensive. It also plays along nicely with WordPress caching plugins like W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache.
Pros: Top 10 Popular Posts Plugin is feature-rich, flexible, and easy to setup. It has aggressive caching to reduce the server load, and it works nicely with WordPress caching plugins.
Cons: Plugin settings page have way too many options, and beginners may find it a bit complicated. Also there’s no option to connect with real analytics.
- Relevant
relevant popular posts plugin for wordpress
Relevant will help you show your popular posts, featured articles, related content, and latest posts on your WordPress website. It comes with multiple widgets including one for popular posts and a neat settings page.
You can display popular posts by comments or page views. It also allows you to display post thumbnail, author, excerpt, and post date.
Don’t want to use the widget? Relevant also comes with shortcodes and template tags that you can use to display popular posts anywhere on your website. You can also enable post blocks before or after post content.
Pros: It combines featured, latest, and related posts functionality into one convenient package.
Cons: The popular posts feature does not allow you to show popular posts in a particular date range.
- Trending/Popular Post Slider and Widget
trending popular post slider and widget
Trending/Popular Post Slider and Widget allows you to show popular posts in a slider, a grid block, or as a plain list. This way, you can show your best content in more engaging ways than just a list of links in your sidebar.
It comes with a simple settings page where you can choose the time range. This allows you to show posts trending during a particular year, month, or week.
The plugin comes with easy to use shortcodes that you can add to your posts or pages. You can also use the shortcode in your page builder plugin modules.
If you want to implement it directly into your theme, then you can use template tags to do that.
Pros: Ability to add popular posts sliders, carousels, and grid blocks and show them anywhere on your site.
Cons: Limited features than other popular posts plugin. The slider, carousel, and grid blocks only work with shortcodes. The widget is basically a list of links with post thumbnails, excerpts, and some metadata.
- WP-PostRatings
wp-post ratings
WP-PostRatings is the next popular posts WordPress plugin on our list. It helps you show the most highly rated posts on your website and allows users to rate articles.
You can choose the rating icons and who can vote on articles (all users vs. only logged-in users). It supports rich snippets, and it is highly customizable through filters and template tags.
The best part about the plugin is its ratings widget, which shows top-rated posts on your website. This allows you to show popular posts by user votes. The plugin also works with WordPress Popular Posts plugin.
For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to add post rating system in WordPress
Pros: You can show popular posts based on user rating instead of page views or comments.
Cons: To implement the plugin, you will need to add template tags in your WordPress theme files, which can be tricky for beginners. If you haven’t done this before, then check out our guide on how to copy and paste code in WordPress.
- Display Posts
display posts
Display Posts is a popular WordPress plugin that allows you to display WordPress posts by creating your own custom queries using shortcode.
It lets you easily showcase your top content anywhere on your site through shortcodes. For instance, you can show posts by comment count using the following shortcode:
[display-posts orderby=”comment_count”]
It also works with plugins like shared counts, which allows you to display your most shared articles as well.
The plugin lets you filter posts by category and display content based on share count and the number of comments. In your display parameter, you can include excerpts, thumbnails, author avatar, and more.
Pros: Display Posts is extremely flexible and you can fetch and display any posts you want as popular posts. It offers detailed documentation and tutorials to help you get started.
Cons: The shortcode has many parameters and no styling. This would make it a bit difficult to use for beginners.
- WP Tab Widget
wp tab widget
WP Tab Widget is a user-friendly and fast WordPress plugin to display popular posts on your website. You can show articles based on pageviews, comments, tags, and recent posts all in a single widget.
The plugin lets you select which tab to show on your site and control the number of posts to show in each tab. The best part about WP Tab Widget is that it only loads posts when a user clicks on any tabs.
This makes the plugin lightweight and ensures your WordPress site runs without slowing down. Besides, you get different customization options such as show or hide post date, number of comments, excerpts, and more.
Pros: A super-fast plugin that doesn’t compromise website performance, as it uses AJAX to display popular posts under each tab. Plus, you get to show different types of posts in one widget.
Cons: WP Tab Widget lacks flexibility and offers limited features in the free version. To get predefined designs, drag and drop features, and more, you’ll have to upgrade to its Pro version.
Which Popular Posts Plugin is the Best?
We believe that MonsterInsights is the best popular posts plugin for WordPress. It lets you show your best content anywhere on your site and offers lots of options for customization.
You can display posts based on share count, comments, manually select articles, or automatically pick the top 5 posts from Google Analytics through custom dimensions.
With MonsterInsights, you also get additional tracking features that help you better understand your audience. Find out the source of your web traffic, top landing pages, referrals, device breakdown, and much more.
We hope this article helped you find the best popular posts plugin for WordPress. You may also want to see our list of the best WordPress plugins for all websites, and our tutorial on how to add web push notifications in WordPress to grow your traffic.
top 10 plugin for wordpress
WordPress is one of the most accessible, manageable and simple to use Content Management Systems (CMS). It can be the face of a blog, corporate website or a magazine. The feasibility to extend the CMS solution in a limitless way is what makes WordPress CMS so popular. With tons of themes, useful plugins and extensive support, it is hard to beat the appeal of WordPress.
The WordPress (WP) plugins are bound to turn a normal WordPress website into a versatile one. WordPress plugins are applications that aid to add new features and functionalities to websites, in exactly the same fashion as applications do for a smartphone. The official WP plugin repository includes over 54, 000 plugins and still counting. That indicates we can have plugins for almost every feature we need on our WordPress websites. However, not all WP plugins are built equal. Few of them include inert coding that can be incompatible with our theme. With this blog, we have curated a WordPress plugin’s list that can always keep your website running at its peak.
What are WordPress Plugins?
WP Plugins are software components written in the PHP language that can incorporate additional features in your WordPress sites. The plugins simplify the process of adding features to the site without compiling a single line of code. They can be as simple or as complex as you want them to be, based on your requirement. You can choose either freemium version (free version) or premium versions (paid version – include more offerings, which are restricted in free version) as per your requirements.
In addition, Plugin API provides a robust set of filters and hooks that allow developers to alter existing functionality or add new functionality with WordPress. They can use WordPress taxonomies, content types and custom files, which enables users to store various kinds of content, not just pages and posts. As an admin, you can activate or deactivate the plugins that you have installed at any time you want.
Top 10 WordPress Plugins List
We have listed the top 10 must have WordPress plugins for your WordPress Site that aid you to extend your business. So, without further ado, here is the first Plugin:
- WPForms
Contact form is essential for every website as it is the channel for your viewers to be in touch with you. WPForm is one of the popular user-friendly WordPress contact form Plugins. It is a drag and drop online form builder and it enables the creation of contact forms, online order forms, email subscription forms, payment forms, polls, surveys and other kinds of online forms as effortlessly as possible with just a few clicks. This plugin can integrate with all leading payment and marketing platforms, and facilities you build powerful forms instantly. Key features and benefits of this plugin are:
Pre-built templates to create contact forms
Smart conditional logic allows you to show/hide form fields/sections on the basis of user behavior
Multi-page forms to enhance user experience
Geolocation option to display user’s location information
Surveys & polls functionality to create as well as analyze user response
Form abandonment to capture email address even though your visitors don’t finish
You can upgrade WPForms to one of its Pro plans to access an extensive assortment of form templates, payment & donation collections via PayPal and many more.
- Yoast SEO
Search Engine Optimization plays a vital role in boosting visitors to your website. WordPress allows you to build SEO friendly Webpages and with its SEO best practices, you can increase your website traffic. Yoast SEO is reputed as the one among the leading WordPress SEO plugins. It aids you to generate sitemaps, add Meta tags, optimize your site for social media, connect your site to Google Search Console, and more. With the following features, it offers a comprehensive solution to enhance your on-page SEO:
Powerful Redirect feature to easily build 301 directs
Internal linking suggestion
Optimize for keywords, synonyms, key phrases, related keywords
Readability check
Updates as per Google’s algorithm
Allows to create custom Meta Header/Description
XML News Sitemaps
Powerful Redirect feature in Yoast SEO Premium makes 301 re-directs straightforward. However, rather than upgrading, you can try the free alternative WordPress Redirection plugin to import your redirects.
- Akismet
Akismet is an anti-spam plugin that evaluates all comments to filter out the spammy comments. It offers a status history of comments to make you understand which comments Akismet marked spammy. It can also check the URLs in the comment body and eliminates the suspicious links. This WordPress Premium plugin offers an advanced security solution in addition to spam protection. With these following features, Akismet plugin ensures your WordPress Security:
Automatically monitors all comments & filters out the spam comments
Offers basic & advanced Spam statistics right in your WP admin area
Display approved comments
Ensures Privacy & GDPR Compliance
- WP Rocket
Quick page load times are critical to every business and caching solution is the ideal effective way to accomplish this. WP Rocket is a WordPress Premium caching plugin that aids to speed up the loading time of your website. It achieves this with the cached copies of each dynamically created page and reduces the workload of your servers. It also reduces the weight of your JavaScript, HTML and CSS files via minification. Your images get loaded only if visitors scroll down the page, as such enhancing the load time of your page. Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo are some of the leading websites using this technique. The plugin includes features like:
Enhance user-end browser caching
Facilitate lazy loading to boost loading times
Integrate caching solution with a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
Load images on requests
Compatible with CloudFlare
Support WordPress Multisite
- UpdraftPlus
Finding a quality solution for the proper backups is among the perennial requirements for the website owners. UpdraftPlus is the world leading WordPress backup plugin. It offers scheduled as well as an automated backup solution for a broad range of storage options including Google Drive, email, and Dropbox. Its backup and restoration features make it quite simple to install, configure as well as take a backup of the WordPress site. As the backups are stored in the dashboard, you can access them later. It includes the options to delete or restore the backups. Features of the WordPress backup plugin are:
Backs up & restores WordPress sites with one click
Easily Clone & Migrate WordPress Site
Backs up to a remote location
Perform complete, manual, or scheduled backups
Backs up non-WordPress files and databases
Extensive remote storage option
Get incremental backups, automatic backups before migration and multiple storage destinations with UpgradePlus premium.
- Migrate Guru
Migrate Guru is a specialized fully automated WordPress migration plugin that provides the easiest, fastest and reliable way to migrate any WordPress sites. This WP plugin runs on BlogVault’s servers, an external server. As such, it doesn’t overload WordPress sites and enables you to transfer large sites even around 200 GB without any issues. During the migration process, there are options to omit the unnecessary files and save the migration setting, which enables you to repeat the migration in the future with a single click. The following features make this WP Plugin as the most preferred choice for WordPress migration:
True one-click migration
Easy to use
No overload on site
No add-ons
Built for large sites
No storage space required
Fully automatic, built-in search & replace
- WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a WordPress e-commerce plugin that allows selling anything, seamlessly. With a plethora of extensions and customization features in place, this plugin makes selling on the WordPress site simple than ever before. With its abundances of themes along with unrestricted customization options, ability to sell digital, affiliate and physical products and countless conversion optimization tools, it stands unique in the WordPress Plugins list in terms of usability. WooCommerce comes with features like:
Sell anything, anywhere
Ship wherever you like
Extensive payment options
Embed products, checkout & more on any page
Product ratings and reviews
Product sorting and filtering
Unlimited images and galleries
Unlimited products
- Redirection
Redirection is the most popular WordPress redirect plugin that aids you in 301 redirections and 404-error monitoring. It is the go-to plugin for tracking broken links and orphan pages. It enables you to auto-track viewers of all kinds of URLs or manually embed 302/307 redirects. This WordPress redirection plugin is simple to install and provides greater speed & performance. Redirection Plugin tracks and logs 404 errors presenting you with – Which WordPress pages that viewers have visited that don’t truly exist. As such, you can create 301 redirects to redirect the future visitors of those pages to the appropriate pages. This tool comprises the following features:
AUTOMATED-redirect to the nearest match
Redirect per source or devices
Redirect Logs
Redirect by the user logged in or not
Manual redirect rules, with all standard-redirect options
- MonsterInsights
Website analytics plays a vital role in business growth. With the MonsterInsights WordPress plugin, you can set up Google Analytics to your Website with a few clicks and observe how well your site is performing. This plugin makes it easy to understand complicated analytics like audience behavior and traffic sources.
With these details, you can realize where you are wasting your time and exclude them while creating a data-driven strategy, which increases your number of audiences. In addition, MonsterInsights tracks eCommerce and provides you important metrics like conversion rate, total revenue, top referral sources, and top products. Key features of this Google Analytics tool are as follows:
Real-time stats
Quick & easy setup
Google Analytics dashboard
Universal tracking
Ads tracking
File download tracking
Enhanced link attribution
Know exactly how visitors find & use your website and increase your sales & traffic with MonsterInsights.
- Wordfence Security
According to the research of WpWhiteSecurity.com, around 73.2% of the popular WordPress powered websites are vulnerable to security attacks. If you don’t want to encounter unnecessary security complications or at least if you want to reduce potential dangers, then it is mandatory to install the Wordfence Plugin on your WordPress site. The Wordfence plugin is dedicatedly designed to keep your site secure. It puts a firewall in place on the website to defend it from malicious traffic. It checks core files, plugins, and themes for bad URLs, malware, SERP spam, backdoors, code injections, and malicious redirects. In addition, it offers a secure login system and scans for malware to block suspicious external attempts. You will get alerts every time when something unusual happens in terms of security on your website. With the following features, Wordfence ensures real-time protection to your website:
Leaked password protection
Advanced manual blocking
Country blocking
Repair files
Two-factor authentication
All the above plugins sure have made it to the list of the bests. However, we are not done yet. We have a bonus plugin for you. This is the latest addition and we are sure you will benefit from it just like the above ones.
- WP Legal Pages
WP Legal Pages is an easy privacy policy generator WordPress plugin with 25+ policy page templates required for GDPR and CCPA compliance
With just a few clicks, this plugin lets you create various pages, including eCommerce Privacy Policy, Terms & Conditions, Disclaimer, Amazon Affiliate Policy, return policy eCommerce, and many more.
The plugin is extremely powerful yet simple. This plugin also offers you an easy shortcodes option, amongst others. The wizard feature guides you step-by-step through each section of a legal document. That way you can make a policy page that’s customized for your website. Some of it’s amazing features are mentioned below:
Lightweight and easy to install
25+ Pre-built editable templates
GDPR, CCPA and COPPA compliant
Easy shortcodes
Multi-lingual support
If you can’t afford the SEO impact, reputation challenges of getting hacked, then hire WordPress developer and empower your mission critical website with real-time protection through WordfencePremium. Upgrade your Wordfence plugin to enable features like Real-time IP Blacklist, Real-time Firewall Rule Updates, and Real-time Malware Signature Updates.
Plugins are the best things to obtain the most out of the WordPress CMS. No matter what kind of website you are running, there are inevitable plugins that are worth installing. There is an extensive list of Useful plugins that we didn’t cover in our WordPress plugins list, but these are a few which can surely aid your business growth. All the plugins listed here are great in terms of building a perfect WordPress website. Most of them are compatible with other WP Plugins. Hence, Go ahead & try them out!
Conclusion
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