How to Order Your WordPress Sticky Posts the Way You Want Them

How to Order Your WordPress Sticky Posts the Way You Want Them

Order WordPres Sticky PostsIf you have more than one sticky post on your site (those posts that you set to stay at the top of homepage no matter what), then you may have found yourself running into a problem trying to order them.

WordPress Stickies OrderI myself had this problem. With more than one sticky on my site, I tried rearranging them by changing the publish dates. Of course WordPress arranges posts to show the most recent first by default, and so I thought this would work.

And it did.

But then it didn’t for some reason.

And then it did again.

But then, yet again, it didn’t.

I could find no rhyme or reason for why it would work one day but not the next. I had read that sticky posts are ordered by their ID numbers and not the publish time, but that simply wasn’t holding true for me. Some days setting a more recent date would work. And then some days it wouldn’t.

WordPress Sticky Order Solution

Fed up, I went looking for a plugin to help me. And I found my solution in the Q2W3 Post Order plugin.

In addition to letting you sort sticky posts, it lets you sort the order of …

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  • All posts on your site – this orders the posts on your homepage (this is what I used to get my sticky posts ordered – there isn’t actually an special section for sticky posts)
  • Posts in a category – this arranges how posts appear inside the category only (i.e. doesn’t change the order on the homepage)
  • Posts for a tag – again, like categories, this orders how your posts appear on the tag page only, not how they appear on the homepage


How It Works

The plugin is very simple to use. First choose exactly what you would like to order:

  • All posts
  • Posts in a category
  • Posts by tag

And then simply plug in the number for the order that you would like.

(Note: You only choose an order for those posts you’d like to arrange at the top. All other posts without a number remain in their original order.)

 

WordPress Sticky Post Order Plugin

Extra Notes

One nice feature of this plugin is that it will automatically resort the order of your ordered posts if you happen to change one. In other words, if you have a post placed in the #3 position but then move it into the #1 position, all the other numbers change automatically: The original #1 goes to #2, the original #2 goes to #3, etc.

One other thing to note is that if you are using sticky posts, they will still appear above all the regular posts, even if you have a regular post set to Position #1. In other words, a sticky post will never be displaced out of the top position by this plugin as long as it remains a sticky.

Photo:  man & sticky notes from BigStock