The 5 Best Trending Post Plugins for WordPress (Compared)
For a content site, there’s nothing more important than your readership.
One of the best ways to grow your audience is to get your visitors to read more than one article, and the best way to do that is to show them your most captivating content.
With the trending post plugins listed here, showing off your most engaging articles is easy.
You can use any of these plugins to find your most popular posts and trending posts, then display a simple list or visual gallery of those posts.
Keep reading to find out our top picks.
Best trending post plugins
Each plugin listed here has unique strengths and weaknesses, so make sure to consider them carefully when making your choice.
Some of them include a simple widget-style design, others have image galleries and sliders, and others only include the data.
Without further ado, here are the best trending post plugins for WordPress.
1. Trending/Popular Post Slider and Widget
Trending/Popular Post Slider and Widget is a simple and straightforward solution for showing off your trending posts. The way it works is simple.
You can use the widget or shortcode to output a list of your most popular posts wherever you want on your site. There are loads of customization options, allowing you to create responsive image galleries and carousel sliders with your post titles and Featured Images.
Another cool feature of this plugin is that you can use views or total comments to rank the most popular posts. The views don’t start counting until you install the plugin, so you could use the number of comments for the first week while the views add up.
The widget is very easy to use, but the shortcode does require you to learn all the parameters and type them in. That said, it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to learn how this system works and get your trending posts to show up on your site.
2. Ultimate Post
PostX is a lot more than just a trending posts plugin. I wanted to recommend a simple plugin first, but if you’re interested in something more advanced, it doesn’t get much better than PostX.
This plugin adds a large variety of Gutenberg blocks to your site. These blocks let you output custom lists of posts styled in every imaginable way. What makes it even more powerful is the query builder, which allows you to output a custom list of articles. For instance, you can create a grid layout of articles from a specific category or a few tags.
Of course, PostX wouldn’t have made this list if it didn’t have a Popular Posts block, which can also be styled in numerous ways.
If you just want a simple widget to list your trending posts in your sidebar, then PostX probably isn’t right for you. However, if you want a beautiful and flexible solution for outputting post grids and galleries (including popular posts), then PostX could be an amazing new addition to your site.
3. Independent Analytics
Independent Analytics isn’t like the other plugins in that it doesn’t have a widget or shortcode for outputting your trending posts.
However, it does give you more robust and accurate data for your posts’ performance.
With Independent Analytics, you’ll get an entire analytics dashboard right inside the WP admin, where you can easily sort your posts by those with the most views or visitors.
This table is already sorted by visitors, so it’s easy to see which posts are most popular. However, there is also a “Visitors Growth” column that shows you the increase in visitors compared to the previous 30 days. This is a more accurate measurement of trending posts compared to using the posts with the most views.
While you will have to manually create a widget or block with your trending posts, you might enjoy using Independent Analytics to get the most accurate data and find out which posts are actually trending on your site.
4. Top 10
Top 10 is another simple option for outputting your most popular posts.
The most notable feature of this plugin is that it includes two widgets; one for displaying your overall most popular posts and another for showing today’s most popular posts.
In addition to the widgets, there is also a customizable shortcode, which allows you to include these lists inside your post and page content.
While Top 10 has a ton of customization options, this also makes it intimidating to set up because there are so many different settings to configure.
Overall, it’s a decent option for displaying a list of your most popular posts anywhere on your blog.
5. WordPress Popular Posts
We’ve written about the WordPress Popular Posts plugin before because it’s such a common choice for this type of functionality. That’s evident by its incredible 200,000 downloads.
This plugin includes several widgets (and a shortcode) for outputting your popular posts. Each widget is customizable, allowing you to change things like the date range to display popular posts from today, this week, and more.
One feature in WordPress Popular Posts that most of the other plugins don’t have is the statistics dashboard. While simple, it does give you a good overview of how many views each of your posts have gotten.
If you want a dependable and flexible way to output your popular posts, give this plugin a try.
Find your trending posts
Did you find what you were looking for?
If you want a simple solution, then either the Top 10 plugin or Trending/Popular Post Slider and Widget will be a good choice.
For more complex options, consider the WordPress Popular Posts plugin.
If you’re interested in design more than data, PostX will let you create beautiful post grids and galleries.
And lastly, if you’re more interested in the data, no plugin here provides more insights into your trending posts than Independent Analytics.
Learn more about Independent Analytics
Thanks for browsing this collection of the best WordPress trending post plugins, and feel free to leave a comment below if you have any questions.
Originally published at https://independentwp.com/blog/wordpress-trending-posts-plugins/ on April 4, 2023.
