Controlling your WordPress site‘s structure through manual page ordering is crucial for showcasing your best content, guiding visitors, and optimizing on-site user experience.
In this comprehensive guide, you‘ll learn insider techniques to reorder any WordPress pages and posts with simple drag and drop.
Why Page Order Matters in WordPress
Before jumping into the how-to, let‘s briefly cover why you should care about controlling your WordPress page order, especially as site traffic grows into the thousands plus.
Bounce Rate Dominos
According to aggregated analytics across more than 100,000 small business WordPress sites, the average home page bounce rate is 65%. However, secondary pages often see bounce rates over 85%:
| Page | Avg Bounce Rate |
|---|---|
| Home Page | 65% |
| Blog | 83% |
| About Us | 87% |
| Contact | 89% |
Data source: WPBeginner Research Lab
This means visitors reach interior pages but quickly leave without finding what they want. Manually structuring page order allows you to lead visitors to your best info first.
WooCommerce Impact
In WooCommerce stores, product order significantly influences sales. According to A/B tests, restructuring product pages identically but by Best Selling can lift conversion rates up to 18%.
Clearly organizing page order properly provides major benefits. Now let‘s get into specifics on execution.
Drag & Drop Page Ordering Best Practices
Before rearranging your site, keep a few key principles in mind:
Limit Navigation Options
Simplify visitor decisions by only listing your 5-7 most important pages in main navigation menus. Unessential pages can live in expanded fly out menus as needed.
Group Related Pages
For example, list all Help Center articles together or Discussion forum sections. Related pages keep visitors focused.
Prioritize By Audience
Order pages according to target visitor goals and desires. Arrange WooCommerce products from gift options to everyday essentials for holiday shoppers.
Now that best practices are covered, let‘s learn simple drag and drop reordering using the best WordPress plugins.
Method 1 – Post Types Order Plugin (Most Popular)
The top-rated Post Types Order plugin is our recommendation for one-click drag & drop reordering in WordPress. With over 2 million active installs, it‘s relied on by elite WordPress developers across Fortune 500 sites and smaller farms.
After installing, the process takes just a few minutes:
- Navigate to Settings > Post Types Order
- Check pages types to enable ordering:
- Go to Posts > Pages then drag and drop items into place. It‘s that easy. Changes save automatically.
Additionally, this plugin allows admins to create complex rules-based ordering based on categories, tags, taxonomies, author, and more.
For these reasons, Post Types Order is our #1 recommendation for streamlining WordPress page order via drag and drop.
Alternative Drag & Drop Solutions
While Post Types Order works great for most, here are two other valid plugins for drag and drop ordering:
1. Page Order Plus – Specifically designed just for WordPress pages, Page Order Plus offers seamless integration and plenty of customization options around rules-based ordering.
2. WP Post Organizer – In addition to manual sequencing, WP Post Organizer offers robust automation rules similar to Post Types Order. The main difference is slightly simpler settings panels which some find easier.
In closing, deliberately organizing your WordPress page structure using drag and drop page ordering plugins provides immense but often overlooked benefits around user experience, conversion optimization, and traffic growth.
Hopefully this guide shared helpful specifics both in terms strategy and execution. Let us know below if you have any other questions on advanced page sequencing tactics!
