How to change the number of posts displayed on your blog page

WordPress offers customizations for almost every aspect of your website. Some features are built in, but that doesn’t mean they’re also customizable. One of those is the blog page. You don’t have to do anything to create a blog page, but that doesn’t mean you can’t change it to your liking. One easy tweak is changing the number of posts that display on each page. Here’s how to change it.

Reading settings

WordPress has a group of settings pertaining to your website’s home page and blog page at Settings → Reading. There, you can change a variety of things — whether your home page is a custom page of your choosing or a listing of your blog posts, how your website’s feeds work, and a few other things.

Most importantly for the tip we’ve described above, you’ll see an option that says “Blog posts show at most” with a number beside it. Here, you can set the maximum number of posts that can be displayed on one page. Of course, this number could be less if you have fewer posts (on the whole or for a particular category or other delimiter), but if the number of posts to be displayed exceeds the number you specify, WordPress will automatically create additional pages to display the remaining content.

For MPWR Design, we set this number at 10, meaning that 10 posts will be displayed on one page before the option is presented to scroll to the next page. This doesn’t include custom-designed pages like our WordPress Tips page — it shows 48 on one page before paginating — but it does include our category pages and search results. If you use a multi-column layout like our WordPress tips page, you might opt for a higher number, but if you use a full-width layout — like, for example, our SEO page — you might consider a smaller number.

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