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Don’t worry, this is easy.
WordPress has a built-in option to change the number of posts per page, and it works with all WordPress themes (including ours)
In this article, you’ll learn how to use the setting to change your posts per page. I’ve also included steps to change the posts per page in your admin dashboard as a bonus tip.
Change How Many Posts Show on Your Blog
If you’re more of a visual learner, you can follow the steps as they’re outlined in this video.
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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.
Enter the number of posts you want to be shown on each blog page, then click the Save Changes button to complete the update.
Your blog will now display that many posts on the front page and each other archive page. That means entering “8” into the setting will also make eight posts display on each category and tag archive page too.
What if it doesn’t work?
If you make this change to your site and the website doesn’t update, it is most likely due to caching.
Find the caching plugin installed on your website and empty the cache completely. Then revisit your website and do a hard refresh to get the latest version of the site to display.
Alternatively, this setting may not work if you’ve built your site with a page builder like Elementor and you’re using page components instead. In which case, you’ll need to use the page builder plugin to adjust the post count.
How to change the posts per page in the admin dashboard
This is a neat trick if you are using the bulk editing tools in the Posts menu and want to update more than 20 posts at once.
Inside the Posts menu, click the Screen Options tab at the top-right corner of the screen.
There are a few options here and among them is the Pagination setting which controls the number of posts displayed per page.
Change this to the new value you want and click the Apply button to save your changes. The page will reload and then display the number of posts you specified.
If you plan on bulk editing posts, limit yourself to 200 or your server is likely going to timeout before the posts can be updated since the request is so large. If you have a shared hosting plan, you might only be able to update 100 posts at a time.
Number of posts displayed updated
Now you can decide exactly how many posts you want to be 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 located on another page.
You also learned a quick way to update the number of posts per page in the admin menu. That can be really handy for bulk updates.
Thanks for reading, and if you enjoyed this tutorial then make sure to share with someone else using WordPress.
