Blog page consists of post elements like images, blog title, widgets, contents and meta data. Meta data includes information such as the publication date, author name, categories and tags, or even custom taxonomies. With the help of meta data it makes visitors easy to find the content that matters to them.
But post elements and meta data needs to be organized because it might detracts visitors from the main event – the content. In this article, we’ll show you how to customize your WordPress blog archive page easily.
Why Customize Your WordPress Blog Archive Page?
The main motive of a blog page is to provide useful information to our readers which is easy to navigate so it’s better to keep it clutter-free. This can be done by customizing your blog page.
When done properly, customizing your blog page can help you in numerous ways. It can increase page views, improve the way a website appears both to readers and search engines, and make your website more professional.
So today in this article we’ll show you how to customize a blog page in WordPress with post elements and metadata. We’ll show you both the theme and plugins options for it.
1. Customize Your Blog Archive Page with Zakra Theme
No doubt the blog page customization option is the most sought-after feature in WordPress. Yet many themes in WordPress still don’t have this feature except a few modern themes. For example, Zakra, Astra, etc.
Here, we’ll show you the entire process using the best multipurpose theme Zakra. It’s one of the best free themes available on the market. With tons of customization options, it lets you design your website your way. Among all, blog page customization is a simple option included in the theme.
Now, let’s get started!
First of all, log into your WordPress dashboard and navigate to Appearance >> Customize. After that, it will open up a live editor where you can make changes to the appearance of your site.
Once you’re there, go to the “Content” option.
Next select “Blog/Archive”. And you can see all the blog posts elements in that section.
Now you can check to see if your WordPress blog posts have a visible featured image, title, or content. Likewise, you can also show or hide other elements like author name, published date, categories, tags, and as well as comments.
And that’s all there is to it. It really is that easy to customize the blog page with Zakra. You won’t even need to mess around with various plugins or anything. You can simply make changes with a live customizer.
2. Customize Blog Page Post Elements and Meta Tags with Plugins
There are other ways to customize blog pages, but since this article is intended for beginners, we have listed some of the easy-to-use WordPress plugins. However, these plugins do not provide all-in-one solutions in terms of post elements and metadata. So you have to install various plugins to customize each post element and post metadata.
1. Hide/Remove Metadata
Hide/Remove Metadata is a free WordPress that allows you to just display/hide author names and published dates effortlessly. Just with a few clicks, you can hide your author’s name and published date from all of your pages and posts.
The easy interface of this plugin lets you manage metadata without any troubles. If you want to hide metadata partially, you have the option of CSS as well. If you want to remove the metadata completely select PHP instead of CSS.
2. Conditionally display featured image on singular posts and pages
There are situations where you don’t want the featured image to be shown on every post view itself, this is where the plugin gets handy. This plugin lets you choose for each post or page if the featured image should be shown in a single view.
The plugin adds a simple checkbox to the featured image panel, that lets you choose if the featured image will be shown in the singular view or not.
3. Hide Pages and Post Title
As the name says, Hide Page and Post Title provide the functionality to the user to just hide the page and post title. You can hide the title from specific posts or pages.
Even though this plugin is easy to use, the only downside is that this plugin does not have an option to hide all the page titles. You’ll have to hide the titles one by one.
4. Ultimate Category Excluder
Ultimate Category Excluder, abbreviated as UCE, is a WordPress plugin that allows you to quickly and easily exclude categories from your front page, archives, feeds, and searches.
The settings for the plugin use a simple checkbox, and you simply choose which categories you want to exclude and where you would like to exclude them. To customize, simply go to your blog’s dashboard, go to Settings > Category Exclusion.
To Conclude:
Thus, you can customize the blog page with post elements and post metadata with the help of plugins and without the help of plugins well. We’ve listed four of the best plugins which are all related to customizing the page and posts.
So, go on and try these plugins according to your needs. If you want to organize your blog page and make it clutter-free then, you need to customize the blog page.
And that’s a wrap. But, before you go, here’s an interesting article on how to edit header and footer. Finally, you can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook for future updates and exciting news.
