This is a review of one of the best WordPress plugins for displaying a list of popular posts – WordPress Popular Posts.

But before we go through the individual features, let’s quickly explain why would you even need such a thing…

The trick with popular posts is that they are popular for a reason, and most of the time it’s way easier to improve your traffic and results by making your most popular content even more popular. And for that to happen you need to know what this content is.

For an affiliate site such popular content is likely an affiliate review or some other highly commercial post, so improving it even more is always worth the effort.

Now, back to the plugin…

Features

When we just look at it, there’s one really basic feature this plugin provides. However, there are many side settings and customization options.

Basically, the plugin allows you to show your visitors what are the most popular entries on your blog (posts, pages), through customizable widgets.

The Good

What’s great about this plugin is that it lets you create an unlimited number of widgets, as long as you have some space to display them. Each widget can be customized individually.

Take a look at the number of parameters available:

The Bad

Actually, the only issue that comes to mind is that there’s no possibility to set an age limit on posts that should be taken into account.

There is a possibility to display data from, say, last 7 or 30 days, but that’s not exactly the same thing.

This may result in a situation where the widget constantly displays the same articles (if you have some really popular content on your affiliate site).

Price / Plan

This shouldn’t be a surprise for those of you who are more familiar with WordPress … the plugin is completely free and you can get it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-popular-posts/.

Customer Support

There’s a support forum dedicated to the plugin available at: http://wordpress.org/support/plugin/wordpress-popular-posts.

Testimonials

Finding testimonials for WordPress plugins is rather difficult, but if you need a proof that it’s indeed a good choice, you can take a look at the number of downloads and ratings as reported by wordpress.org:

• downloaded over 352,000 times,


• 264 reviews, with the average rating of 4 out of 5 stars.

The Bottom Line

For us, this is the best popular posts plugin available. It offers quite an easy to use interface, where everything is available through widgets. There are no plugin-wide settings to worry about.

However, due to the fact that you can’t filter your content according to its age (as mentioned earlier) we have to give this plugin a rating of 4/5.

Additionally, since most WordPress plugins are free you can also try some alternative plugins before making the final decision:

• Easy Popular Posts.


• Top 10.


• Recently Popular.

Which one seems to be the best fit for you and your affiliate blog?