Want to showcase your most popular WordPress posts from the past day, week, month, or all time? Highlighting top content helps visitors discover your best articles fast, driving higher engagement and page views. We'll walk you through the process step by step.
Early on, a new WordPress site has limited content, so you can manually feature posts in a sidebar widget.
As your site grows, older articles often get overlooked. Showcasing popular posts exposes your strongest content to new visitors, boosting time on site and page views.
The key? Avoid repeating the same all-time hits. Mix it up with posts popular in the last day, week, or month for fresh variety.
Here's how to set it up effortlessly.
Subscribe to WPBeginner’s YouTube channel for more tutorials. Prefer reading? Scroll down for the detailed guide.
Start by installing and activating the WordPress Popular Posts plugin. See our step-by-step guide to installing WordPress plugins for details.
This is the leading plugin for popular posts, with flexible options like time ranges, excerpts, thumbnails, and view counts.
Head to Appearance » Widgets and drag the Popular Posts widget to your sidebar.
Title it "Today's Top Posts" and set the time range to "Last 24 hours." Tweak other settings as needed, then hit Save.
Add another widget titled "This Week's Hits," set to "7 days," and save.
Repeat for "This Month" ("30 days") and "All Time."
Widget order doesn't matter yet—we'll refine it next.
Combine them into a sleek tabbed interface for your sidebar using the Ultimate Tabbed Widget plugin. Install and activate it (plugin guide here).
In Appearance » Widgets, spot the new "Default Tabbed Widget Area."
Drag all Popular Posts widgets there.
Now add the "Ultimate Tabbed Widgets" to your desired sidebar.
Set a title like "Popular Posts," select "Default Tabbed Widget Area," and choose the tabs template. Save changes.
Visit your site to see tabs for daily, weekly, monthly, and all-time popular posts.
Reorder tabs by dragging widgets in the tabbed area.
This setup has helped countless sites like ours increase engagement. More tips? Check our guides to drive traffic to your WordPress blog.
Liked this? Subscribe to our WordPress YouTube channel. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
