Most WordPress themes are set up so that your latest blog posts appear on the front page of your site. Or, if you have a static home page, your most recent posts appear on a dedicated page. Regardless of how these posts are displayed, in a list, in a tiled view or whatever, one thing remains the same: the newest posts appear first.
But what if not want Does your most recent blog post rank that high? Believe it or not, this is a fairly common wish of bloggers across all industries. Let's take some time now to explore some of the reasons bloggers want to hide posts in the first place, and how to do this quickly and easily.
Why hide posts?
There are several reasons why someone would want to hide a post from their home page. For starters, your blog can offer a range of post types, from news briefs to more in-depth tutorials. The latter makes the most attractive posts appear on a home page because they are always valuable and not urgent. At the same time, if you don't update your blog very often, emphasizing your high-value content over the news constantly makes your site more relevant.
Perhaps you've recently written a post on a controversial topic and don't want that to be the first thing your visitors see. This is understandable as you don't want to detract from other, perhaps more relevant posts. Or maybe you just want to include posts written by you and not guest bloggers. Or maybe you just want posts from a certain category to appear. The reasons are diverse. The important thing is that you can make this simple change without pain. And you have a couple of options to do it.
Consider creating pages
This takes a bit of planning ahead of time, but is by far the simplest method of preventing certain posts from showing up on your blog's home page; do not make it a post.
Instead, create a new page and post your content there. You can then choose where you want this page to appear. You can choose not to have a link on the home page to this page if you wish by modifying your menus. Just don't include the page in the menu as a link and everything should be fine. Quick and painless.
Again, this only works if the content in question hasn't been created yet and you don't anticipate having to do it very often. Despite this, it is an easy solution.
Use the WP Exclude From Homepage plugin
The easiest way to exclude posts from the homepage is, anyway, by using a plugin (if your homepage is set to show the latest posts). One of the top rated plugins today for this is called WP Exclude From Homepage, which enables you to exclude categories, tags, even page posts from the home page without breaking pagination. You can learn more about the plugin here.
Use the WP Hide Post plugin
Now if you have already created content as a post and don't want it to appear on the home page, you can achieve this by installing a plugin. WP Hide Post It is a great option because it is simple and performs this task in a simple way.
Once installed, you are provided with several options in terms of post visibility directly from the post editor:
You can choose to delete the post from the home page of your site. At the same time you can remove it from applicable category pages, tag pages and archive pages. You can even choose the option to prevent a specific post from appearing in site-wide search results, as well as on pages dedicated to the author. It's up to you.
You can hide the post in question in all of these ways or just from the home page. Anywhere else you do not select, the post will appear regularly with the normal link structure and all. In other words, it will still have a standard permalink and will be included in the sitemap. This means that you can still search through search engines and will appear in those results, but will not appear at the top of your site. This at the same time can be useful when you are creating exclusive content for your readers and you plan to provide access to it only by means of a direct link.
As a side note, this plugin can at the same time be used to hide pages. You have the option of hiding them from the home page or anywhere else on the blog, including site-wide search.
Hide posts from RSS feeds
WP Hide Post can at the same time be used to hide posts from appearing as published in your RSS feed.
Again, you may want to do this if your intention is to create posts that act as resources that don't fit in with your blog's main style or focus (but would still like to rank in terms of SEO), or if you write posts on occasions that aren't there. associated with the topic and do not want them to be available to readers as the first thing they see when they visit your site.
To do this, all you have to do is check the box that says "Hide sources" on the right side of the post editor once the plugin is installed.
Hide categories manually
If you want to hide an entire category from your homepage, you can do so using the previously discussed WP Hide Post plugin or you can manually add a bit of code in your theme. functions.php file to enact the same effect.
There is a good tutorial on this on Locoed Web Development. Remember to backup your site before modifying theme files like this. Basically you create a dedicated category for the posts you want to hide, note the ID of the category, then paste the following code snippet at the end of the file just before the "?>" And replace the "xx" with the ID of the category :
function exclude_category ($query) {if ($query-> is_home ()) {$query-> set ('cat', '-xx'); } return $query; } add_filter ('pre_get_posts', 'exclude_category');This code snippet will prevent your chosen category from appearing on your site's home page, which can be useful if you plan to offer multiple channels of content on a regular basis and don't want one of them to mix with your site's main content. . .
With the ability to hide certain posts from your WordPress site homepage in your developer's toolbelt, you get the freedom to create more posts than you want to do without cluttering your site. You no longer have to be afraid to comment on a hot topic or create more content with SEO in mind, as your home page will stay exactly the way you want it to.
Do you hide certain posts from the home page of your site? If so, why? At the same time, what tools do you use to achieve this? We would love to hear your comments.
