How many posts to show on your home page

Monday, April 27th, 2009 at 6:07 am

Todays question:

Any suggestions on the number of posts that one should show? Default is 10, but I have seen many blogs that only show 1 post.

This is actually an unanswerable question because it will be different depending on how you use your blog.

First understand that the visitors coming from the search engines are only going to see the post that it indexed. Google and the others will be linking to the exact post not your home page.

So the next questions are how are you advertising your home page and what do you want to have happen?

Here is an example – Each week on another blog I do a recap of the week and send people to the home page of the blog via an email blast to my lists.

I want people to keep reading if they are interested right down the blog because they may find something of interest in the second or third post. I’ll also do an email blast if I add an article hoping they will keep reading and take advantage of the offer that is in the second or third post down.

There may be others but the only time I can see where a single post on the home page might be worthwhile is where you are using a blog as a CMS (Content Management System) instead of a static web site to take advantage of the RSS feed and interlinking that is built into a blog and the ability to interact with your reader through comments.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold