Configuring WordPress Reading Settings – WordPress Beginners Guide

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Today in this tutorial, we are going to talk about WordPress Reading Settings. Here you would learn what configuration options are available in the Settings Reading screen and how to configure the “Reading” Settings of WordPress.

In general, the Reading Settings control how your site is going to look like, and it provides a handful of control to tweak the look and feel of your WordPress blog. Moreover, these reading options can be used to enhance user experience on your site.

These Settings (Reading) control the features related to adding a static homepage, how many posts are going to be shown on a single page or in feed, will it send full article or excerpt in feed, and if you want search engines to index your site.

How to Open WordPress Reading Settings: 


You can access the writing settings by going to your WordPress Dashboard and click on Settings ⇒ Reading option. (As shown in the below image)

WordPress Settings Reading Menu

Then it will open the WordPress Reading Settings Screen as shown below

WordPress Reading Settings page

Now you are all set to configure the Settings of WordPress Reading Screen.

Configuring WordPress Reading Settings: 


While you can to the Settings ⇒ Reading page, you got many options like selecting your blog’s homepage, number of blog posts to be shown in blog page etc to customize your website’s default look and feel, and also to enhance user experience. All the options are explained below:

Your Homepage Displays: 


You can use this setting to define if you want to display a static page as your blog's homepage or you want your recent blog posts to be displayed as your blog's front page (homepage).

This setting displays only if you have one or more Pages created in the backend.

[Please note: if you are using any third party static front page plugin or some other 'posts display' control/restriction plugin, then this option may not work correctly.]

Your latest posts:

This is the first option under the display homepage settings. If this button is selected then your latest posts will be displayed on your blog's front page.

Please remember that the number of posts that would be displayed on your homepage is controlled by "Blog pages show at most" setting [This option is explained later in this article].

A Static Page (Select Below):

If you selecting this option, then you would be able to set a "Static Page" as your blog's homepage and define another page as your actual blog listing page. The homepage and Posts page cannot be selected as the same page.

Homepage: This option gets enabled only if you select "A Static Page" as a homepage. Here you can select the actual page that you want to be displayed as your blog's front page.

If you do not select any page here, then your blog will show your published posts on both the blog's front page and on the Posts page you specify.

Caution!! If you would like to create your own static homepage template file, then do not name it home.php, otherwise you will face problems at the time of viewing the "blog" or "posts" page of your site.

Posts Page: This is also a sub-option of "A Static Page" option. Here you can select the Page on which you want to show your blog posts. If you do not define a page here, your blog posts will only be accessible via other navigation features such as category, archive links etc.

Caution!! Even if you password protect the selected page, visitors will NOT be asked for a password when trying to view this posts page. Also, any Template or formatting assigned to this page will be ignored as it will use the theme's index.php (or home.php if it exists) to show the blog posts.

Blog Pages Show at Most: 


This option lets you choose how many blog posts you want to display on each single blog page. The default setting is 10 posts per page.

If you set a higher number of posts to display on each blog page then your blog's load time may get slower. Tweak this setting with utmost care. The default setting is 10 posts per page, which is optimized for faster load times.

Syndication Feeds Show the Most Recent: 


This option lets you set the number of blog posts that WordPress will be sending out at once via your blogs RSS feed (If configured, can be accessed via http://yoursite.com/feed/).

For Each Article in a Feed, Show: 


You can select to send the Full text or Summary (Excerpt). Full text means that the entire article will be included in the RSS feed. Summary means that only the Excerpt (default is first 55 words) would be included in the feed, along with a continue reading link to read the rest of the post.

Search Engine Visibility: 


This option controls your preference if you want your site to be indexed by search engines or not. Checking the option “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”, will ensure that your site is not indexed by search engines.

It adds a “noindex” tag in every page or posts so that even if search engines crawl your site, they will not index your site.

Save Changes: 


The last and final step is to save the entire configuration you have just changed; Clicking on the Save Changes button will ensure that any changes you have made to these Settings are saved to WordPress database.

Once you click the save changes button, a confirmation text box will appear notifying you that your settings have been saved.

 

We hope that you have enjoyed the above tutorial on how to Configure WordPress Reading Settings. Be with us to explore free training on Leading Technologies and Certifications.

Leave us some comments if you have any question about the options you get at WordPress Settings ⇒ Reading screen, we would be very happy to help you.

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Posted in WordPress Tutorial and tagged , .

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Scott

What if you want static elements as the first piece of content and then latest posts after that static content?

Scott

Thanks Ayan. That’s what I ended up doing (actually a mixture of the 2).