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WordPress posts are always sorted by date (reverse-chronological).
And if you’re reading this, you probably don’t want to sort them by another attribute, like alphabetical or category-based sorting.
What you need is a way to reorder your posts to a completely custom order.
Luckily, there is a perfect (and free) plugin for adding this functionality to your site, and in this post, you’ll learn how to use it.
This plugin is compatible with all of our content-friendly WordPress themes.
How to set a custom post order
The best plugin for changing the order of your posts is the Intuitive Custom Post Order plugin.
You can download and install this plugin from the Plugins > Add New menu.
Once installed, you’ll find a new menu in Settings > Intuitive CPO. You can enable reordering for posts by checking the “Posts” box.
Once reordering is enabled, visit the Posts menu, and when you hover over a post, your cursor will turn into a four-directional arrow. You can then drag-and-drop any post into a new position in the post list.
This drag-and-drop system works great for quickly moving your posts around. The plugin doesn’t modify the dates of the posts; it only sets up this custom reordering functionality.
Additionally, if you deactivate or delete the plugin, your posts will return to their normal reverse-chronological order.
One drawback and alternative
Due to the nature of custom reordering, this plugin makes a lot of database calls. For that reason, sites with thousands or tens of thousands of posts can experience performance issues.
This plugin is a simple and intuitive solution for a blogger who wants to reorder their posts, but performance issues aside, it’s not a practical choice for large websites.
If you have a large website and need to control what shows up on the homepage, you should create a custom blog page with a custom query that selects exactly the posts you want without ever modifying the articles’ order in the Posts menu.
You can use Elementor Pro to do this, and I recommend getting started with my tutorial to learn the basics:
How to Use the Elementor Page Builder Plugin
Smaller sites can do perfectly well with custom post reordering, but using a custom post query instead of reordering the posts is a better long term solution of bigger WordPress sites.
More ways to customize your site
With the Intuitive Custom Post Order plugin, reordering posts is simple.
It saves the hassle of fudging dates to reorder posts and lets you change the order in just a few clicks.
If you had fun implementing this new technique and want more tips for customizing your site, check out this article next:
31 Easy Ways to Customize Your WordPress Website
It’s one of the longest posts I’ve ever written and includes tons of tips and ideas for customizing your WordPress website.
Thanks for reading this guide on how to change the order of your WordPress posts, and please share it with someone else before you go.
