If you want to display the most popular posts using WordPress widget in your website’s sidebar to attract more visitors to those articles, a plugin called WordPress Popular Posts will help you to achieve that.

It is always a great idea to drive more traffic to the most popular or probably the revenue generating posts on your site so that you make the best use of incoming traffic to your site.

Now-a-days, many modern WordPress theme companies like MyThemeShop and many other companies publish themes with built in popular post widget which makes it real easy for the users to display the popular posts.

However, if a theme doesn’t come with built in popular post widget many newbie WordPress users may get confused about how to show the most commented or the most popular posts in a WordPress Widget.

So, here is the way to display most popular posts using WordPress widget with the help of WordPress Popular Posts plugin.

Also Read:

• Automatically Set The Featured Image in WordPress
• How to Show Remote Images as Post Thumbnail in WordPress

[symple_box style=”boxinfo”]Showcase Most Popular Posts in WordPress Widget[/symple_box]

First you need to install and activate WordPress Popular Posts plugin. The activation process is same as any other free WordPress plugins.

Once the plugin is activated, you can go to Appeareance > Widgets, drag the WordPress Popular Posts widget to wherever you want it to be and click on Save.

This plugin provides you number of options to display most popular posts using WordPress widget as per your set parameters, you can setup the most popular posts with time range for example last 24 hours, last 7 days, last 30 days.

If you set the time range last 7 days, the widget will display the most popular posts in the last 7 days, widget will get changed as per your time range input.

Support for custom post type is one of the best part of this plugin because all the modern themes comes with number of custom post types, so this plugin will help you to showcase your products which you have published using custom post type.

You can also display the thumbnail image of the popular posts which will make the widget more attractive and engaging.

Display Most Popular Posts in WordPress Page or Posts

Though the general use of this plugin is straight forward by using WordPress widget as mentioned above, it also provides you option to showcase the most popular posts using shortcodes in post or pages.

By default -that is, without any parameters- the [wpp] shortcode lists the most viewed posts (up to 10) within the last 24 hours. However, you can change the parameters as per your requirement

For example:

To show the most popular posts in the last 7 days by number of views, you can use the shortcode below

[wpp range=weekly stats_views=1 order_by=views]

For all the parameters you can check the FAQ section of WordPress Popular Posts plugin

This is probably one of the simplest way to display most popular posts using WordPress widget, hope this article helps you to show the popular posts effectively.