Overview
The Reading Settings in WordPress (Settings → Reading in the wp-admin dashboard) control how your site displays content to visitors, including how many blog posts appear on your homepage. This article covers the most common changes customers ask about and clarifies what our support team can and cannot do on your behalf.
Accessing Reading Settings
- Log in to your WordPress admin dashboard (typically yourdomain.com/wp-admin)
- In the left sidebar, click Settings
- Click Reading
Common Reading Settings Changes
1. Setting a Static Homepage vs. Latest Posts
The "Your homepage displays" option controls what visitors see when they land on your site.
- Your latest posts – Shows a reverse-chronological list of your most recent blog posts on the homepage (default for new WordPress installs).
- A static page – Displays a specific page as your homepage, with an optional separate page for your blog posts.
To use a static homepage, you must first create the page(s) under Pages → Add New, then return to Reading Settings and select them from the dropdowns.
2. Limiting the Number of Posts on the Homepage/Blog Page
The "Blog pages show at most" setting controls how many posts appear per page on your blog listing.
- Default is 10 posts.
- Lower numbers (e.g., 5) can improve page load times, especially on sites with heavy featured images.
- Higher numbers give visitors more to scroll through but increase page weight.
3. Syndication Feed Item Count
"Syndication feeds show the most recent" controls how many posts appear in your RSS feed.
- Default is 10 items.
- Affects RSS readers, email subscription plugins, and some third-party integrations.
4. Full Text vs. Summary in Feeds
"For each post in a feed, include" determines whether your RSS feed shows:
- Full text – The complete post content.
- Excerpt – Just a summary (uses the manual excerpt if set, otherwise the first 55 words).
Choosing Excerpt can help drive traffic back to your site rather than letting readers consume content entirely within their RSS reader.
5. Search Engine Visibility
The "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" checkbox is a crucial setting.
- Unchecked (default) – Search engines can crawl and index your site normally.
- Checked – Adds a noindex directive and updates robots.txt to request search engines stay away. This is honoured by Google and Bing but not enforced.
Important: If your site isn't appearing in Google, this is the first setting to check. It's commonly left enabled after a site is moved from a staging environment to production.
Can our Support Team Make These Changes for Me?
Short answer: No, not in bulk, and generally not on an individual basis either.
Reading Settings are part of your WordPress application configuration, which is owned and controlled by you as the site administrator. We provides the hosting platform — we do not manage the content or configuration inside your WordPress installation.
Why we don't offer bulk changes
- We do not have the ability to push configuration changes across multiple customer WordPress installations. Each WordPress site is an independent application with its own database, admin credentials, and user-defined settings.
- Making changes to your WordPress settings without your explicit instruction on a per-site basis would be a significant overreach of our role as a hosting provider.
- Even within a single customer account, we do not maintain admin logins to your WordPress dashboards as a matter of course.
What we can help with
- Guidance and documentation — We're happy to walk you through where a setting lives and what it does (this article is an example).
- Troubleshooting when a change doesn't take effect — For instance, if you've saved a setting but it appears your CDN or caching layer is still serving the old version, we can help clear caches.
- Restoring from backup — If a configuration change broke something, we can help restore your site from a recent backup.
What we cannot help with
- Logging into your wp-admin on your behalf to change settings (unless explicitly requested in writing for a specific troubleshooting scenario)
- Applying the same setting change across multiple sites you own — even if they're all hosted with us, each site needs to be updated individually by you or your developer.
- Changing Reading Settings (or any other WordPress settings) across customer accounts. We simply don't have that capability.
If You Manage Many Sites
If you operate a large WordPress portfolio and need to apply identical settings across many sites, consider:
- Management platforms — Tools like MainWP or ManageWP can apply some settings across linked sites from a single dashboard.
- Custom scripts — A developer can write a script that connects to each site's database or uses the REST API to apply changes.
These approaches remain your responsibility as the site administrator, but they're the right way to achieve bulk changes across a WordPress fleet.
Still Need Help?
If you've read through this and still have questions about a specific Reading Setting, or you're troubleshooting a caching issue after a settings change, open a ticket and we'll be glad to assist within the scope described above.
