Widgets »Recent Posts Widget

The Recent Posts Widget displays your most recent posts in your sidebar, making it easy for your readers to see what’s new on your blog.

Here’s an example of what it looks like:

Once you add the widget to your sidebar from Appearance → Widgets, you’ll see that the widget settings look like this:

• Title: Sets the title that will display above the recent posts in the sidebar. (e.g., Latest Posts, What’s New)
• Number of Posts: Limits the number of posts to display. (If you have fewer posts than the limit, that number of posts will show.)
• Display post date: Shows or hides the published date of the post.
  

Visibility

Changing Visibility is optional. It is an advanced option which allows you to choose when to show the entire recent posts widget based on different factors. It will only appear in the sidebar for posts that fall in that category. It will stop appearing on all other pages that aren’t related to that category. For instance, if you blog about what you do during your free time and want the widget to only when looking at a single travel post or a category page of nothing but travel posts, set the visibility to “Show” if “category” is “travel” and click Save. Then the widget will stop showing on all other post pages, and only show if it is post from the travel category.

If you want to instead limit the categories that show (and have the widget appear on all pages), consider using a Text widget and either writing out what you want your visitors to see or using the Display Posts Shortcode to automatically show only a certain number of posts of a specific category: [display-posts category="travel" posts_per_page="3"]

Using the the Display Posts Shortcode allows you to make a similar-looking widget, but show the recent posts from only that category on all pages.