How to Display Popular Posts by Day, Week, and Month in WordPress

One effective strategy to boost engagement on your website is to showcase your most popular content in a timely manner. Spotlighting popular posts allows your visitors to quickly discover your top content, which also helps you increase pageviews and conversions.

By displaying popular posts categorized by day, week, and month, you can offer your visitors a selection of relevant and interesting articles. This can lead to increased time spent on your website and a higher likelihood of users exploring additional content.

In this article, we will show you how to display popular posts by day, week, month, and all time in WordPress.

Why Display Popular Posts in WordPress?

When you start a WordPress blog, you don’t have much content. This allows you to manually display selected posts in a sidebar widget.

However, as your website grows, you will notice that older articles on your website don’t get much exposure. By showcasing your top content, you can allow new users to quickly discover the best articles on your website. This boosts user engagement and increases your page views.

The problem is that if you are showing your all-time popular articles, then a very limited set of articles get repeated exposure. You can diversify this by displaying popular posts by day, week, or month as well.

Let’s take a look at how to easily display popular posts in WordPress by day, week, month, or all time.

Add Popular Posts by Day, Week, and Month in WordPress

The best way to show popular posts in WordPress is using MonsterInsights. It’s the best Analytics plugin for WordPress and helps you set up Google Analytics without editing code.

For this tutorial, we will use the MonsterInsights Pro version because it lets you automatically show top posts from Google Analytics.

There is also a MonsterInsights Lite version that’s free and also includes the Popular Posts feature but does not connect to GA.

For a more comprehensive overview, check out our MonsterInsights review.

First, you will need to install and activate the MonsterInsights plugin. If you need help, then please see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you will be directed to the MonsterInsights welcome screen. Go ahead and click the ‘Launch the Wizard’ button.

After that, you can follow the onscreen instructions to configure Google Analytics.

For more details, please see our guide on how to install Google Analytics in WordPress.

Now that you have added Google Analytics to your website, the next step is to go to Insights » Popular Posts from your WordPress dashboard.

MonsterInsights lets you show your top articles within the content, in the sidebar as a widget, and display popular products if you have an online store.

For this tutorial, we will use ‘Inline Popular Posts’ and show featured articles within the content of other blog posts.

The plugin comes with prebuilt themes, and you can see a preview of how your popular posts will appear on the website.

Once you have chosen a theme, simply scroll down to see more customization options.

For instance, you can change the title color and size, edit the color of the label and background, and more.

Show Popular Posts by Day, Week, Month, and All Time in WordPress

Next, you will need to choose how the plugin will determine your popular posts. Let’s see how you can show posts by day, week, month, and all time.

Displaying Popular Posts by Day, Week, and All Time

In MonsterInsights, you can manually select which posts appear in the Popular Posts widget.

This is useful when displaying top content from a specific day or week. Plus, you can also show your all-time best articles anywhere on your website.

Simply select the ‘Curated’ option under the ‘Sort By’ section and then choose the articles you want to feature.

These could be your evergreen content, weekly announcements or news, trending topics from a particular day, and more.

Just begin typing the name of the posts you want to include, and then select them as their name pops up in the field. To continuously display your top posts of all time, you simply need to select them, and as long as ‘Curated’ is chosen, they will appear as popular posts.

However, if you want to display popular posts by the day or the week, then you will have to manually change some of these curated posts so that they stay fresh for your audience.

For instance, if you are featuring different WooCommerce products weekly, you will need to choose which posts are listed under ‘Curated’ each week.

Displaying Popular Posts by Month and All Time

In MonsterInsights, you get multiple options to automatically show popular posts by month and all time.

First, you can show your most commented pages from the last 30 days by selecting the ‘Comments’ option. The plugin will randomly rotate blog posts with the highest comments and show them in the popular post widget.

Similarly, MonsterInsights also lets you automatically display popular posts based on social shares using the ‘SharedCount’ option.

It integrates with SharedCount and helps you display your all-time most shared articles. This way, people can easily find content that’s driving social engagement.

MonsterInsights also offers an option to show the top 5 posts from Google Analytics in the last 30 days. This way, you can show your top-performing content from last month or all-time anywhere on your site.

First, you will need to select the ‘Curated’ option under the ‘Sort By’ section.

After that, you can enable the ‘Add Top 5 Posts from Google Analytics’ option in the ‘Automated + Curated’ section.

To ensure that your data is being fetched from Google Analytics, click the ‘Test Automated Posts’ button under ‘Automated + Curated.’

A popup message will now appear, showing that the popular posts are being fetched correctly. You can click the ‘Close’ button.

Note: You will need to set up the ‘Post Type’ custom dimensions in MonsterInsights and Google Analytics to use the Automated + Curated feature.

Custom dimensions are additional metrics you can track in Google Analytics. For more details on custom dimensions and how to configure them, you can see our guides on how to enable author tracking in WordPress and the best time to publish a blog.

Insert Popular Posts into Your WordPress Website

Next, you will need to select how you’d like to insert the featured articles into your website.

MonsterInsights offers 2 options: automatic placement and manual placement.

If you select the ‘Automatic’ option, then you can decide how many words you want the popular post widget to show. There is also an option to include and exclude pages from display featured posts.

When you are done, simply go back to the top and click the ‘Save Changes’ button.

This way, your settings will be saved, and MonsterInsights will automatically display popular posts on your site.

On the other hand, you can also show popular posts in any blog post by adding the MonsterInsights block or using a shortcode.

First, add a new post or edit an existing one. Once you are in the content editor, simply click the ‘+’ button and add the ‘Popular Posts’ block.

After that, you can see a preview of your featured articles in the content editor.

Once you are happy with the widget’s appearance, you can go ahead and publish your article.

We hope this article helped you display popular posts by day, week, month, and all time in WordPress. You may also want to see our guide on how to track link clicks and button clicks in WordPress and the best WordPress table plugins.

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