When your website become popular or start to get a good traffic, it’s time to retain your blog visitors by providing more interesting content and articles to read. How can you do that ? the answer is displaying random posts in WordPress! This tutorial on how to display random posts in WordPress without a plugin will give you two advantages : Clean fast loading Code and Less use of database requests, which will have a good impact on your WordPress load speed.
How to Display Random Posts In WordPress Without Plugin
1- Display Random Posts in Any Part of Your WordPress Blog
You can use this small code in any part of your theme to display random posts :
<div> <h2>Other Posts</h2> <ul> <?php $args = array( 'numberposts' => 5, 'orderby' => 'rand', 'post_status' => 'publish', 'offset' => 1); $rand_posts = get_posts( $args ); foreach( $rand_posts as $post ) : ?> <li><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li> <?php endforeach; ?> </ul> </div>
‘numberposts’ => 5, : with this code we will display 5 random posts, so you can change this value.
2- Display Random Posts in WordPress with Excerpt
<div> <h2>Random Posts</h2> <ul> <?php $args = array( 'numberposts' => 5, 'orderby' => 'rand', 'post_status' => 'publish', 'offset' => 1); $rand_posts = get_posts( $args ); foreach( $rand_posts as $post ) : ?> <li><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a><p><?php the_excerpt(); ?></p></li> <?php endforeach; ?> </ul> </div>
After adding one of this codes, we will have to style them. To do that, open the style.css of your theme and add this code :
.random-posts { margin: 10px 0; } .random-posts p{ font-size:13px; } .random-posts h2{ font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold; } .random posts ul { list-style: square; margin: 10px 0; } .random posts ul li { padding: 3px 0; border-bottom: 1px dashed #ccc; } .random posts ul li a { font-size: 14px; text-decoration: none; }
Note that can use different colors, size..etc to suit your theme style design.
That’s all ;) See you soon for another quick WordPress tutorials here on SeoDesign.
You can also read our previous article : How to add WordPress pagination without plugin.
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