When this blog first started, I used to display 20 posts on the front page. As time pass, I reduced the number of front page post to 15, then 10 and now, only five posts are displayed per page. My reason for doing this was to reduce the load time and excessive scrolling required to get to the bottom of the page. Since some of my posts can reach over 1000 words – and since I don’t break the post up in to multiple pages – even having only five posts can create a very long page.
Would you like to see more than five posts at a time on this blog? I generally do two to three new posts per day so you generally will be able to catch some of yesterday’s posts. However, for readers who don’t visit this blog on a daily basis, they could end up not seeing all the new posts. However, this wouldn’t be the case if you subscribe to my RSS feed. 
The question for this weekend: How many posts do you show on your blog’s front page and what is your reasoning behind it?
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I was showing 10, but just cut it down to 5. Better look and feel now.
Same with me. I tended to write longer posts at the beginning and 10 made the site way too big on the front page. Lots of scrolling going on etc. I think 5 is the best for me now.
I currently have 5 posts on frontpage and they are excerpts instead of full posts, the main reason is not the long page but more is duplicate content and decreasing the size of the homepage as well as words in the homepage which than in return increases (slightly) the weight of my targeted keywords for the homepage. And I have to say, it performs much better.
excerpts posts on the homepage of a blog is the number one thing that makes me close my browser.
In my opinion it’s the worst way to throw away potential readers.
True, it does make it very annoying to read the content.
~ Dave
My is summarize and i feel that it could have 10, if you read long post then having 10 would be a little too much, don;t you think so?
I follows John like crazy, so if he is showing up 5 posts then how can i go by showing 6 or 7 posts
Because you should show what you think works best for your readers, John can show even 1000 posts in homepage I won’t care, as I read his posts via RSS.
Looks much better Zac – can be pretty annoying when a page is 1km long.
Five. When I embed AdSense into the posts, I can do three with ad units and two with link units.
Adsense isnt good for blogs!
That’s a pretty shallow comment. It may not be the best, but it’s not “not good’.
~ Dave
i’m a beginner. so what’s better ways to monetize a blog?
I use 6 too as not many users directly come to the home page. That is also the reason why I don’t use AdSense on my home page within posts too.
The fact is that most hits come to inner post pages and having AdSense on home pages definitely brings down the eCPM as not many click on them.
BTW in order to cut down on load time further you could also limit the content shown per post on the home page rather than showing the full content this could increase click throughs too.
Why don’t you set a cookie that saves the last time the person visited. Frequent visitors will see less and people who don’t check in too often see more.
Wordpress doesn’t have that option.
Yeah, that’s not an option for Wordpress. Even if you could, that’d confuse the hell out of search engines. Search engines in general like stable static content, not dynamic content.
We all know John doesn’t care much about SERPs
Ya, he’s still like banned for his own name.
~ Dave
But that is a good idea
No, I think that’s a stupid idea. Shoot me if you want to.
If that was available i’m sure John would consider implementing. Unfortunatley this isn’t an available Wordpress Hack.
I have 9 posts, but may reduced it to 5 after I apply my new theme.
For me, i increase from 3 to 5 to 7 now.
Well, if you take a look at my new theme, you will understand
3 is too short. 5-7 is fine in my opinion.
Is there an reason you don’t use the partial post method for the posts on the front page, or do you find visitors don’t like clicking on a ‘read more’ link?
That would reduce the amount of scrolling required on your front page. I see a lot of blogs doing it.
Because Danny hates that feature
Thats why lots of blog’s suck
It just adds extra work for the visitor. Make it as easy as possible to get to content.
~ Dave
10, as I have 2-3 posts a day, and want them to stay longer on the front page. But I do not show the full post on the front page.
I currently display three. This is due to googles T.O.S. To be honest It’s still quite annoying even though there are only three, as the content will span way down the page making the sidebar look even more desolate than it is.
You can use hacks to make the front page only show the first paragraph or so and a link to read more then put Adsense only in the individual post pages so that you don’t have to worry about the three block limit.
Here’s some links that will help with expandable post summaries: http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en-us&q=blogger+hacks+expandable+summary&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
I blog daily and I show 5 posts on the front page. I show the full content rather than just a snippet.
I think that’s a good idea, having a partial post is really annoying as readers since you gotta click one more time, especially if that sites slow or hosted on another country.
Hmm… i will have to check out your blog now since you made some great questions about the QuarterWiki the other day…
I show the standard 10 because I like giving my readers plenty to read. I can see why you might want to use only 5 especially when you have posts like the Lambo Reventon one that had lots of pictures.
I use 10 posts after after my website becomes established. But for those of you that are having trouble getting the search engine boot to crawl you site, you may consider having 20 posts on your homepage. I find it that a lot of websites link to my homepage, and it would be easier for your new articles to get indexed by search engines if you display them on your homepage. I use this strategy whenever I have a new website.
I show 4 per page. Load time was my main concern.
Show them all – we want more John Chow!
I show 7, is a lucky number I guess =).
On my blog I show 20, but the load time is pretty bad.
Thanks John for getting me to think about this! I think I will reduce it to 5!
I show anything modified or posted within the month – generally 12 to 15 articles.
I have no reason – I just picked it out a long time ago and stuck with it. Dunno how the readers feel, but google seems to like it.
I do 6 but 10 is way to much.
I think 10 posts are more than enough.
5 is a good amount. If people are really interested in past content there is always the archives as well as the older posts link at the bottom of the page. With long posts you might lose readers interests at more than 5
I show 7 per page. I typically post once a day, but when I have a sponsored post I’ll have two posts that day. I don’t like to leave the sponsored one up as the top post. I don’t know that there’s a real good reason behind the number 7, but it feels about right.
I remember when you had a lot more on the front page, and I thought that it was pretty long, but I’d be reading and then look over at the scroll bar and look how far down I was. If you’ve got the readers attention, it probably doesn’t matter how many are on the front page.
3.
If you have your 300×250 Google ad embedded in the “loop” of the index.html file, then only 3 ads will show at any given time.
With that low number, I make sure my archives section is visible so viewers can go back and read the last week if they missed it.
I do just the same, great minds think alike it seems. If the articles are substantial then I believe 3 posts are more than ample.
I used to have 30 posts on http://zedomax.com. Like you said, I had to try to lower the load average for the server and now it’s down to about 9 posts. But for starting blogs, I do recommend 30.
I typically have the last 3 days worth of posts on my front page. Typically, that seems like the sweet spot for me so far, but I may tweak this a little bit more as I understand my readers a bit more.
Hey John, you should really write about the new Knols Project by Google and how QuarterWiki will piggyback on their effot…lol…
20, 15, 10 are way too much, I only post 5 myself.
My reasoning behind it, apart from load time considerations, is to also not give my readers everything all at once. I find that a lot of my hits go beyond the front page, often picking up older articles..
Would it be valid to say that showing more posts on the front page would increase keyword exposure to search engines?
I doubt it. The variety of keywords would be too great to have any proper targeting.
~ Dave
7 posts on front the page.
I tested this number on many different niches and simply is the best number for me. Feel free to experiment this you will see some good results.
I have 10 posts. I think 15, 20 or more is a bad thing for the blog. There’s a lot of readers with non-broadband connections and the loading time is very long. I like to show only 10 posts
since you don’t do a feature with wordpress, I think 5 is more than enough, especially when you have picture plenty posts
LOL, what a timely post! I was just puzzling over the same issue earlier today. I used to have 10 on my front page, but eventually dropped it down 8, and then to 6. But this morning, and after looking again at the load time on IE (I hate IE!), I decided that 5 was probably most appropriate for my site. Man, how I wish that everyone would just use Firefox instead!
Anyway, I think that 5 probably hits a nice sweet spot…considering load time and all. As we know, many people are still on dial-up (unfortunately for them), and anything beyond that is probably a bit much. So I say around 5 or so.
In my experience, if you have lots of good, quality content to begin with, then people are quite happy to look around for more good content on your site – much more so than they are willing to WAIT for a slow-loading page right off the bat.
Shine on,
Aaron
Aaron Cook Dot Com™
I used to show 10 — but I reduced to 8… I don’t want my blog to load so slowly…
More of a question than an answer, doesn’t less content per page mean less keywords per page for a search engine to pick up on? In which case if you’re starting out, it would be better to have more posts per page, decreasing in relation to the number of visitors you have?
10 – seems like a good number.
I just started my blog, but I have it set to show 10 posts per page. I may change it depending on how much scrolling there will be when I finally get to 10 posts.
Too much. Change it now!
I do 5. I find it is the right amount for my medium-sized posts.
Have the number of post in total encountered before to you that you might slow down the time lapse for those who are still on dial up and are still your dedicated fans?
I display 20 posts on my front page as my theme’s layout is totally different from a normal wordpress theme
. Well i do not have any issue with with the 5 posts you are displaying, but yeah i do have problem with 5 posts appearing while searching. Since wordpress inbuilt search is not that capable with just 5 posts displaying in the search page, it makes very difficult to reach the post i am looking for. Moreover since they are just excerpts lots of space is left empty. So if you can include nearly 10 – 15 posts on search page, it will be great addon 
.
I think that 5 posts are enough for the front page. But post length also matters. I’m displaying 5-6 post excerpts on my front page. I think that this is little. But I love it.
i set mine to 7, but maybe its too many? i will experiment by reducing it to 5 as i have the recent posts widget in my side bar
I think lowest number of post is the better solution even for a little blog.
The opening speed of a page is one of the most important things. users likes speed speed and speed when surfing around the web.
So i vote fore a low number of post per page.
John, more than 5 might be too many on your blog. Your page takes long to load as it is. People unknown to your site might not want to wait.
I plead guilty to being impatient on unfamiliar sites and hit my back button after several seconds.
More so than the posts, is the amount of comments for each posting. I think John needs to upgrade his servers or wordpress some how as it does take a while at some times for comments to actually “post”.
i do 11 do minimize load time and to have some content on the page. i’m at http://www.CARversation.com, can someone check my site and let me know a good number, my posts vary from length, some are 200 words-1,500 words, to big pictures to just a youtube video.
please let me know.
thanks.
I use 5 posts as well. if someone has been referred to my site from like a Search Engine or something, then they don’t want to it to take forever. That’s a potential subscriber lost.
I only show 3 now, so as you said its quicker to load, and there are always RSS feeds people can subscribe to. Maybe when and if I add 3 or more posts a day I will increase this.
I show 5 post on my blog’s front page and my reasoning behind it is simpe navi and low time and scrolling
I started out with 5 post on the frontpage from the beginning.
I feel more post is a total overkill of scrolling, especially if you’re writing long posts.
This wil encourage people to leave your site faster then you would like it.
So keep a max 5 posts please, that’s more then enough
I usually read your blog every third day so for me personally, 8 – 10 would be better, would hate to miss a killer entry!
I Think that 10 is too much
i currently use 3 posts in my front page and my posts are not too long
I show 4 posts now, as anymore and I feel it is too much to scroll down for the user and it begins to look ugly. Before, I used to have way more posts on the front page, but I learned the error of my ways.
I currently show 5 articles on the front page in order to keep page loads quick and to prevent the home page from becoming overly long. My niche relates to guitar design and and articles tend to be image heavy.
I also just relaunched the site with a new design but now I’m thinking of reducing the number even further – maybe 3 or 4.
I also show 5 posts in my blog.
I start to show 10 but it’s a long scroll until the bottom so i decided to show only 5. I write 1 or 2 post each day so each visitor can find posts from yesterday in main page if he want.
I think what u are doing is good enough. 5 Posts is never too long nor short.
Well I only show 5 posts on the front page and the main reason behind it is it cuts of the loading time and looks good.
I prefer showing more posts but splitting them up with “read more…” instead of showing the full post.
Exactly. Now the reader can quickly sift through and find what he or she wants to read. Win, win, win.
I go between 5 and 7 posts on my front page. When I have a lot of short posts I show 7. It makes the page shorter so people do not have to scroll as much.
Glad to see that John is using ideas from my own blog… I posted on this in early October. Since then, I’ve gone to five full posts on the front page, but I strive for variety with video posts, graphics, short posts, etc. to break things up. I’ve tried a variety, though, but generally find that five posts is easiest on the server. I really hate blogs that have more than 20 posts… there are some that seem to try to put the whole blog on the first page, followed by every conceivable icon, javascript and ad program they can find…. It loads like treacle even on my 8GB ADSL link.
Kenneth
I’m a big fan of the continued reading. At first I thought it was lame, but now, it’s much more practical and my readers don’t mind.
I think 7 entries is much better. That way you have 2+ days covered.
Looking at your site, the main problems that are causing the higher load time are mainly two things:
- Bad coding
- Too many images
Your site took more then 12 seconds to load completely, whereas my blog cosmocentral.com take about 1-3 seconds to load.
How to solve this problem?
- You are reducing the number of posts, thats a good step.
- Check your code. Have it done using CSS as much as possible. In many cases you can use CSS instead of images
- Optimize the images to reduce the size. No matter you use jpeg or gif there are ways to reduce the size.
- Use HTTP compression.
I used to put 8. Then I cut it into 5.. However, since I used the new theme, I found that it doesn’t look nice with so many long posts.. So I cut it into 3 only..
I think its a bad idea to show too much, but only one is too little.
5 I think. I have a static front page on one site.
I think that more than 5 takes too long to load.
I currently display 10 posts / page and the page gets quite long. I’ll probably cut it down to only 5 /page. Not sure yet, I’ll soon change the theme of my blog. I’ll adapt the number of posts to how these fits with the theme.
from 6 i’m drop’n it to 3..
I admit, I can’t catch up with your posts, so I subscribe to your feed and read it later
Having 3 posts on a page is good and it does lower the load time compared to when you had 10-20 posts. Talk about cooking dinner before your page loaded
-Mike
It takes longer to load a single page on this site compared to home page, because of all the dam comments!
I show five. It looks a whole lot better.
5, no more, no less, only 5, just 5.
Personally, my blog is set to display the most recent 10 posts on the homepage, but I don’t diplay the full post, only a snippet is displayed. Makes it easier to give each visitor a general overview that way.
I show 10 on the frontpage but they are excerpts for both loading and dup content considerations.
Personally, I’ve chosen to have the 10 most recent posts displayed on my homepage. Only a snippet of the post, rather than the full version will be displayed, however, in order to give each visitor a better overview.
I’m doing 5, 1 full page and the other 4 are excerpts.
Hey Fat Man, I like that idea!
Now to get my hands dirty and get into the php code with loops and if statements!
I think 10 is a standard and thats how many i shwo in my front page. But its all depends hwo long are your posts, if short like 250 words then u coudl set like 15 or mroe but if your posts are longer like articles then i tihnk 10 is max.
hmmm i can show my post in my home blog is 5 post because i want my visitor easy load my blog
Mine used to be 10 but now, 6.
10 standard is fine for me always
I show only four posts on front page of my blog becasue some posts are quite long.
Five. I used to have ten, but based on some of the issues already raised (load time, scrolling, etc.) I wanted to drop it down. I actually polled my readers and “Don’t care how many” actually won. So. Five it is.
Currently I’m showing four. It suits my theme well
But I usually go for five.
I usually stick to about 5, or 10 if I use summaries instead of the full post.
~ Dave
Too Many. I need to cut down. I roughly show around 10 at the moment.
Currently I am showing 5 posts on the first page
, It’s my new blog http://www.vhxn.com
Dear chow
if i was at your place,i would place one post per page. First, it will create lot of easy for readers as not much scrolling will be required. secondly it will automatically force readers to come and read what is new on blog as every time they will visit they will have new post for the current day. This will also help showing contents quickly.
Technically this will help improving your website traffic. Ask how?
It will generate much more page view, that is how !.
Good luck:)
I show only 7 posts.. and I use the Read More option so that my frontpage is around 50kb only…………
And also I use an image for all posts… If I am not doing that then I could make the make homepage less than 30 or 25kb…….
I’d like to see 10 or so. =)
Thanks–just discovered your blog. Great stuff.
I had a similiar experiene when I first started my blog (financeviewpoint.com), where I want to display all my posts to show how much writing I have done. After a while you learn what works best to monetize your blog…in that I know display about 5-7 posts (depending on how long they are) in order to maximise the content to ad ratio as users (hopefully) scroll down.
Andy.
I show one post every Page and I think that makes my readers comfortable. I liked Ur blog and want assistance from you regarding my blog http://www.allaboutparenting.blogspot.com. Can you please help me by giving ur valuable suggestions.
We only do 2 posts on our front page.
We used to do 5, but it made our front page way too long.