WordPress Plugin: Custom Query String (CQS)

One of the easiest ways to decrease your page load time is to limit the number of post that appear on your home page. By default WordPress sets this to 10 posts (Options > Reading > Show at most: _ posts) and anything from 5 to 10 is probably the optimal range. Of course this can very depending upon your blog and it’s content.

The problem is that this setting applies to every page on your blog. For example, say I set it to “Show at most: 5 posts”. This may be great for the home page but leaves much to be desired for the archive and search result pages. Anyone doing a search on my site would only receive 5 results per page. If there were many results, the user would have to navigate through Next and Previous links to get more results. Something that is not very useful and will likely annoy users quickly. I know I would be annoyed.

To solve this problem we can use a wonderful, and not very well known, plugin called Custom Query String (CQS). The CQS plugin allows us to specify how many posts we want based on a number of factors including page, category, author, date, and more.

Here is a look at the admin page for the Custom Query String (CQS) plugin.

As you can see from the screenshot above I am displaying 5 posts on my home page, but displaying 10 posts on archive pages and 20 posts on search results. This allows me to keep my home page cleaner and more efficient, while giving my readers more results while searching through the site. This is much more user friendly.

There are numerous conditions that can be used to define how many posts are displayed on a page under certain circumstances. These are illustrated in the screenshot above. In addition you can also set up conditions based on specific categories. So for example you could have 10 posts per page for category one and 6 posts per page for category two. This is not necessary for me but could be for some.

It looks as if this plugin is currently unsupported, however I’ve been using it for awhile now and hasn’t given me any problems. Download Custom Query String (CQS).