How many articles should you have on the front page of your blog?

How many articles you should have on the homepage of your blog depends heavily on the topic and the article writing frequency. What do the top 10 German blogs do? What is the excerpt length of the preview articles? What factors should you consider with regard to Facebook and Twitter? Should you always present entire articles or only excerpts? What is still clear and what is not? What should new blogs do?

Basic considerations for how many articles you should have on the homepage of your blog

If you start from the basic presentation rules, you should never present more than 5 points at once, because the normal audience cannot take in more than 5 points at the same time. Does this rule also apply to blogs or just normal PowerPoint or flipchart presentations?

In principle, I think that these rules don't make much sense for blogs, because the user looks for the articles that are of interest to them and out of 10 articles, this may only be 1 or 2, depending on the specialization of the blog. So if the blog is very specialized, it might make sense to display a maximum of 5 articles at a time.

What do the biggest blogs do?

For this purpose, I took 10 of the most popular German marketing blogs and analyzed the number of articles on the blog page. The result is as follows:

- seo-united.de - 16 Articles
- omnea.de - 10 Articles
- t3n.de - 10 Articles
- more-fire.com - 6 Articles
- seokratie.de - 30 Articles
- aufgesang.de - 10 Articles
- karlkratz.de - 30 Articles
- pr-blogger.de - 10, then scrollable extension
- blog.bloofusion.de - 10 articles

On average, this results in 14.6 articles.
To be honest, I wasn't expecting such a high number. In the end, however, it was almost the expected number of 10. The spikes can perhaps be explained by the individual experience values of the respective blogs. I also didn't expect such long articles. The More function is hardly ever used.

During the analysis, I almost had the feeling that it wasn't about the criteria mentioned, but perhaps about the clarity of writing and publishing. So perhaps the number of articles on the homepage only depends on the screen resolution of the writer and the author doesn't care about anything else.

Preview articles or teasers, called excerpts in WordPress, were hardly used. I hadn't expected that. My blog is currently structured in such a way that there are no teasers. Instead, only one article is displayed. I set it up this way so that the user can read everything straight away and requires fewer clicks. Perhaps the Top10 blogs are thinking along similar lines. However, it does take quite a long time to load 10-20 articles in full.

What goes with Facebook & Twitter?

If you link your blog to Facebook and Twitter to automatically publish the articles there, Facebook and Twitter will automatically use a length that is suitable in terms of the number of characters. So you don't have to worry about this in the first step.

Number of articles for new blogs

When you're just starting out, you don't know exactly how often you'll be blogging and you don't have that many articles to begin with. This leads to a different approach. It usually makes sense to present one or two articles in full. After a certain amount of time, you should then switch to displaying 5-10 articles as teasers on the homepage.

Of course, it depends on the frequency of the Bloggings, because if articles are on the homepage for too long and nothing changes, this is counterproductive. Users may leave the site or no longer visit as often.

How many articles should you have on the front page of your blog?

You can change the maximum number of articles displayed under Settings/Read. You should always bear this in mind. The more you display, the slower the page load will potentially be. Ultimately, the statistics are the deciding factor. You can actually change the number of articles displayed at any time and track the reaction in the statistics over a period of time in order to ultimately arrive at the individual optimum for the respective blog.

What experiences have you had? Have you used other decision-making criteria?