WordPress’ Reading Settings
The Reading settings offer you the ability to configure your site visitors’ experience by managing how content is displayed. You can configure how the front page functions the number of posts that are displayed on blog pages and in feeds. The Reading options also allows you to manage the amount of content that gets displayed in in feeds. Overall the Reading settings section doesn’t have a lot of options to configure and nothing with any real risk so lets dive in and configure the Reading settings section.
The first options on the Reading settings page is the Front Page Display set of options. This allows you to set how the Home page of your site functions. If you want the Front page to show one of your existing static pages (it can still contain some dynamic content) then you would select the Static Page option and then select which Front Page you would like to designate as the Home page for your site. This is very useful if you are developing a website where you would like to have some specific message or information as the Home page. An example of this is a business that would like to highlight some services on the home page, but want to make use of WordPress’ high quality CMS (content management system) functionality.
The second part of the Static Front Page Display option setting involves telling WordPress which page you would like to use to display Posts. This is a page where  the dynamic content (Posts in WordPress’ lingo) are shown. This could be a News or Blog page in the site. Sometimes the news of a site can detract a little from the sales message that you want to feature. By setting a Static Front Page and a separate Posts Page, you can quickly change the entire look and feel for your site.
Since WordPress has its roots in the blogging world, the default setting for the Front Page Display is Your Latest Posts. This ensures that WordPress will display your newest, freshest content where visitors are most likely to find it; the Home page. In this configuration WordPress makes an excellent blogging site keeping your readers up to date on your newest posts.
It is important to note that a Theme can completely override some or all of the Reading Settings. There are now a huge number of WordPress Themes that have static Front pages regardless of how the settings in the Front Page Display are configured. If you are making a change on this settings panel and not seeing that change reflected on the front end of the site, you can test whether the Theme is programmatically overriding the setting by switching to a new theme like Kubric that is known to not override these settings.
The same can go for the next setting;Â Blog Pages Show at Most. If the theme is not overriding this option, the Blog Pages Show at Most option determines how many posts to show on a webpage. If you set this option to 5 and you have 6 posts in total, the Front page will show the most recent 5 pages and a link to earlier posts. This setting can impact all the different pages in a site including Tag, Category and Archive pages in addition to the Home page. This setting is very frequently overridden by themes, but they usually provide an option to configure that number within the theme.
The next option is very similar, but deals with the site’s RSS Feed. Unlike the previous option, it is seldom overridden by a theme, but can be configured through a 3rd party feed service. Although most sites don’t generate dozens of posts a day, if your site is prolific in its content, then it makes sense to increase the number of items in the Syndication Feeds Show the Most Recent option.
You can control what type of content is being shown in an RSS Feed through the next option. The default option is Full Text so the RSS Feed will contain the complete post content. If you use advertising on your site or just want to make sure that people actually visit your site instead of reading your posts on their RSS reader, then it makes sense to only send out the Excerpt via the RSS Feed.
The final option to configure is one that I have never had need to change from the default. If you need to change the Encoding for Pages and Feeds, you will probably know why and know much more about character encoding than I do. Leave this setting to UTF-8 and move on to the next WordPress Setting to configure!
Finished
You now have configured some powerful options that help determine how the site looks and functions. With the options in the Reading settings, you can transform your site from a blog to a full-blown business site, just by changing how the Front page of your site works. And with your new site, the people will be talking! Don’t forget to Save Changes. We’ll configure the Discussion settings next.
A veteran of the Dot Com era, Dave has a wealth of experience in the web and marketing. A WordPress user since version 1.2.5, he has spent the past six years falling in love with WordPress and sharing that passion with the world. WordPressConfig.com is the latest escalation of that effort.