By default, WordPress displays the 10 newest posts on the front page.
If you want to show more or fewer posts on your front page, there’s a simple setting you can use in the dashboard.
Want to change the number of posts listed on each page in your admin dashboard? Check out this post for a solution.
Change How Many Posts Show on Your Blog
First, login to your WordPress dashboard.
Once logged in, visit the Reading settings menu. If you hover over the Settings menu item, the Reading settings page will be the third option.
In the Reading settings menu, locate the “Blog pages show at most” option.
Change the number in the input to the number of posts you want displayed on each blog page. Then, click the Save Changes button to complete the update.
Your blog will now display that many posts on each page. For instance, if you chose to display 7 posts and you have 13 posts in total, the blog would display 7 posts and have a link at the bottom leading to a second page of 6 posts. This is called pagination.
You can scroll to the bottom of the Compete Themes blog page to see an example of this pagination in action.
Conclusion
Now you can decide exactly how many posts you want displayed on each page of your blog.
This works the same way if you have the blog displaying on your front page, or if you have a static homepage and the blog is located on another page.
What if your wordpress doesn’t have a “reading” option under settings? My wordpress home page does not look like that, I have no limit to the number of posts on my front page and it’s very frustrating! could it be the theme I’m using? I want to show 10 or less than 10 and it shows all of them!
Hi Leah,
This can happen if there are not any Pages published on the site. Try publishing a page via the Pages menu and check to see if the Reading Settings then appear.
Short and Sweet tutorial.
Say suppose you have added Widgets like “Featured Posts” in homepage. Then, you need to change number of posts in Widget section only.
Glad you liked the post! The Reading settings menu should be used for controlling the number of posts on the blog and won’t affect widgets. Most widgets like the “Recent Posts” widget will include an option to choose how many posts you want displayed.
I posted a page and still no Reading options! I hate that there’s an odd number of posts in a double column setting. it’s SO annoying and I’d like to change it to an even number but I can’t.
Hi Bethany,
Are you using a self-hosted version of WordPress or WordPress.com? It looks like WordPress.com sites do not display the same Reading menu as self-hosted sites.
Thank you so much. I’m new to all this so this was very helpful.