Many bloggers talk about the amount of front page posts that you show on your blog. Some say the ideal amount is anywhere from 5 - 10. Some bloggers just go all the way and have as many as 20 posts on their homepage.
While having a lot of content show up on your front page may have its reasons for you, maybe you assume that more visitors will read more and stick around. The fact is that if you have too many posts on your front page then your blog takes way too long to load. Especially if you have tripped it up with all sorts of widgets and what not.
The safest option is to limit between 5 - 10 posts for your front page. If you write a lot of long posts then break them up with the “more” tag. So the content loads faster and your visitor can read more if they really want to. 7 out of 10 times they will click to read the post further.
Most of the well established bloggers balance the content they write when it comes to the length of their posts. So that their main homepage doesn’t look too overwhelmed. Some might say well I like to have a lot of posts on the front page. That’s great for you, probably not so for your visitors.
I keep 9 posts now on my front page, and used to have as many 14. I also used to have a huge bounce rate on the homepage because the site took too long to load. It has decreased since then. For me anything above 10 is a no-no.
How about you? How many posts do you have on your front page?
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About the author
Hyder has been blogging for the past two years on this blog. He started Weborithm, his web company, in 2007 and along with designing blogs and websites also releases various web related products.
Ellie on July 23rd, 2007
1
I have 3 posts on my front page. I wonder if I should have more, but I don’t want to overwhelm my visitors.
Ali on July 23rd, 2007
2
I think 3 is too less. Maybe 5 would be a better number? Of course you’re entitled to have 3 if you really want to.
Michael on July 23rd, 2007
3
I have 8 posts on my front page, that comes out to about 2 days worth of content.
I think that 3 is way to few 5 or 6 would definitely be better.
TechTalker on July 23rd, 2007
4
I have 8 on my front page, I think that is a good balance, it depends but that probably equal to 4-6 days content.
Jonathan Franzone on July 23rd, 2007
5
I keep 10 posts on my front page, but I use the Post Teaser plugin to automatically chop the front page post content to a certain number of words. I think this shows a nice amount of variety, but also keeps the size of the front page from being too large.
cooliojones on July 23rd, 2007
6
I have 3 on there now, and upgrade from 2! But I don’t want people to get tired of scrolling all the way down to read all of the posts, and also I have a ‘recent posts’ widget on the side that facilitates navigation.
Ali on July 24th, 2007
7
Looks like so far the popular average of 5 - 10 posts is what most people prefer.
Desty on July 24th, 2007
8
I have 3 articles on my homepage. The reason for that number is that I don’t have much on my sidebars, and would like to try to keep the sidebar length equal to the content page length. I try to be picky on what I put on my sidebars. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Thanks!
Shawn
J Johnson on July 26th, 2007
9
Thank you for the tip. I was running too many and my page was loading slowly. You have a great site too.
Jason
soufulow on July 29th, 2007
10
I’m running on 5 posts most of the time. If for certain reason the length of the posts are short - I’ll go in 7. As mentioned, you gotta balance the content and avoid overwhelming your readers.
BTW, thoughtful post Ali! thank you.
David on August 20th, 2007
11
I had the default size, 10 posts, for a long time. I recently changed it to 5 posts, which for my most recent posts changed my front page download size from ~500k to ~250k. Well worth the change, IMO. I’ve considered chopping it down to three, because I tend to write fairly long posts, but I may set up a stylesheet to do that only for mobile users.