Understanding the WordPress reading settings options

Have you gone into settings > reading on your WordPress site dashboard?

It’s a pretty short page, but the items on it are often misunderstood. Let’s break the options down:

  • Front page displays – This is where you can create a homepage that doesn’t show blog posts or use your blog main page as the homepage for your site.
  • Blog pages show at most – On your blog page {whether that’s home or not} this number sets how many posts should show. It usually impacts shopping cart plugins as well, unless they have an additional setting to override it.
  • Syndication feeds… – This number is how many posts load in an RSS reader. I often see blogs set this to the same as the posts on their site, when they would benefit from showing more. {If someone is a new reader, they may want to look through your archives.}
  • For each article… – This setting relates to the RSS readers mentioned above, not blog settings on your site. Do you want readers to read the whole article or do you want them to get a summary + have to click through back to your site to read the rest?
  • Search engine visibility – If this boxed is checked, your site won’t show up in search engines. So save this setting for sites in development or testing sites.
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