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Home page of a website is a very crucial page as it represents the overall website. Often a viewer either directly reaches to it or comes to it after visiting a page provided by search results. It is a good idea to show your recent posts on front page to tell a viewer what is new on your website. In this article, I will be mentioning how to display recent posts list on a page. I will also cover method to add child pages list on a page which is required when we have a number of pages under a topic and we like to mention all of them at a place for easy navigation.
Plugin to Display Recent Posts with Thumbnail
Though one can manually maintain/add recent posts list on the front page, it is better to use a plugin to do this automatically. I have personally found WP Show Posts to be the best when it comes to adding list of recent/latest post to a website. Please see below the result of using this plugin on my website.
It has a number of settings to configure the result like no. of recent posts to show, type of posts, no. of columns for display, excerpt length etc. It also has a setting enabling which one can insert a thumbnail for each recent post listed. However it will pick up only the featured image of a post for the thumbnail, though one may like to have a flexibility here.
Plugin to List Child Pages of a Parent Page
I recommend using CC Child Pages to add list of child pages under a parent to a page. Its output, as shown below, looks very elegant and simple.
This plugin has a number of shortcode options to control various aspects like no. of columns, excerpt length, thumbnail size, parent page id, child pages to exclude etc. One can go through the plugin website to see all options. Here also thumbnail can only be the featured image of the page.
That was all I had for this post. Please do comment if you have found this article to be of any help to you. You can also visit my page “Essential WordPress Plugins List for a Website” to find a complete list of plugins which will enable you to build a secure, SEO friendly and functioning website quickly.