How to Display Last Updated Posts in Sidebar?

There are 4 important parts of a blog, Header, Footer, Content Area and Sidebar.

Header is mostly used for menus, Logo and a small horizontal banner.

Footer is for copyright info, footer widgets and few links etc.

Content Area is used for displaying post index.

And at last Sidebar is used basically to show banner ads, social follow buttons, to show popular posts, to show top commenters and similar kind of things.

Sidebar can be used effectively to increase a blog’s page views and to reduce bounce rates to a greater extent.

You might have noticed that most of the bloggers use popular posts or random posts widget in sidebar to grab readers’ attention to these posts. Most probably they click to check them out. This results into more page views.

I recently started editing my older posts to make them better because when I started blogging I was a newbie and thus I did so many mistakes and the posts were not well written. I edit the old posts to make them better and more informative. To provide users an insight about the post details, I have added a time stamp for the date and time when the post gets updated, it looks like this:

It’s good to show readers that this is an old post which has been updated on particular date. It’s well enough though I think that when a user goes to a post then only he/she can see this, right? So what if we give users an option in sidebar which shows the latest modified or updated post? Isn’t it a cool idea?

Of course it is!

I did this and it looks like this:

This is awesome as I can display a number posts which has been recently modified or updated so that readers would be aware too that this post got some modification or updates. It provokes them to click and see which further result into more page views and lesser bounce rates.

But the question is how to do it?

Because you cannot add the posts manually every time, you need something that can fetch those updated posts automatically and lists in the sidebar.

As I am using WordPress I started searching for a plugin when the idea of displaying last updated posts in sidebar hit my mind. And as you know there are awesome list of plugins available in wordpress repository, I found a plugin named as Last Updated which does this task simply without any hassle. Click here to download the plugin.

After downloading it on your computer system, go to your blog’s dashboard, click on Plugins >> add new >> upload plugin >> Locate the plugin file in file uploaded and click on Install now.

Once it is installed, activate it then go to Appearance >> Widgets. You will find there “last updated” widget.

Drag it to your active sidebar and set the options as per your choice.

Now when you open your blog’s home page you will see a new item added in the sidebar which looks like this:

Final words:

Sidebar is an important part of the blog so use it smartly and effectively. This plugin is able show those older posts which you have modified. This indirectly helps your blog getting better page views.

I am sure you loved the plugin. Install it, use it and share your views with me via comments.