How to Exclude Sticky Posts from the Loop in WordPress

Do you want to exclude a sticky post from the loop in WordPress?

Sticky posts are a great way to highlight your featured content. However, there are certain places on your website where you don’t need sticky posts to be on the top.

In this article, we will show you how to completely exclude sticky posts from the loop in WordPress.

Why Should You Exclude Sticky Posts from the Loop?

Removing sticky posts from a loop on your WordPress website can be helpful if you don’t want to show them in a particular area on your WordPress website.

Sticky posts are useful in highlighting important content like your pillar articles, high-traffic blog posts, and time-sensitive content. However, they can crowd your most recent posts widget area and make your latest content harder to access.

This is where excluding sticky posts from the loop comes in handy. WordPress can not guess this so you need to explicitly tell WordPress to exclude sticky blog posts from a custom loop.

Let’s see how you can remove sticky posts from the loop in WordPress.

Excluding Sticky Posts from the Loop in WordPress

To help you exclude a sticky post from the top of the loop or completely remove them from the loop, we’ve created a custom code snippet.

Since this requires editing code on your website, it can be tricky for beginners. If you haven’t done this before, we recommend going through our guide on how to paste snippets from the web into WordPress for more details. You might also consider hiring a developer for one-on-one help.

How to Ignore Sticky Posts in WordPress

This code ignores that a post is sticky and shows the posts in the normal order on your WordPress blog.

By using this code, your sticky posts will still appear in the loop, but they will not be placed on the top.

All you have to do is enter the following code to your theme’s functions.php file or in a code snippets plugin:

<?php
 
// The loop arguments
$args = array(
    'posts_per_page' => 10,
    'ignore_sticky_posts' => 1 
);
 
// The loop
$the_query = new WP_Query($args);
if ($the_query->have_posts()) {
    while ($the_query->have_posts()) {
        $the_query->the_post();
 
            }
}

We recommend adding this code with WPCode, the best code snippets plugin for WordPress. With WPCode, you can safely and easily add custom code in WordPress, without editing your theme’s functions.php file.

To get started, you need to install and activate the free WPCode plugin. If you need help, see this tutorial on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Once the plugin is activated, head to the Code Snippets » + Add Snippet page from your WordPress dashboard.

From there, find the ‘Add Your Custom Code (New Snippet)’ option and click the ‘Use Snippet’ button underneath it.

Next, you can add a title for your snippet, which can be anything to help you remember what the code is for.

Then, paste the code from above into the ‘Code Preview’ box and select ‘PHP Snippet’ as the code type from the dropdown list on the right.

After that, simply toggle the switch from ‘Inactive’ to ‘Active’ and click on the ‘Save Snippet’ button.

Completely Exclude Sticky Posts From the Loop

Next, if you are using sticky posts in a slider plugin, then sometimes you might want to completely exclude your sticky posts from the loop.

Simply add the following code snippet to your functions.php file or in a code snippets plugin:

<?php
 
// The loop arguments
$args = array(
    'posts_per_page' => 10,
    'post__not_in' => get_option( 'sticky_posts' ) // do not display the sticky posts at all.
);
 
// The loop
$the_query = new WP_Query($args);
if ($the_query->have_posts()) {
    while ($the_query->have_posts()) {
        $the_query->the_post();
 
         }
}

This code will not display any sticky posts in the post loop.

You can follow the same steps as above to add this code using the WPCode plugin.

For more tips on modifying WordPress themes, check out our WordPress Theme Cheat Sheet for beginners.

We hope this article helped you learn how to exclude sticky posts from the loop in WordPress. You may also want to see our guide on how to get a free email domain and our expert picks of the best WordPress plugins.

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