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1. julieinbali
   Member
   Oct 20, 2011, 5:48 PM

   Hi, I received the wordpress email 2 days ago about a new theme (iTheme2) and it explained that 'sometimes important posts fade away from the home page' - I didn't know that that happened, and that comment made it sound pretty random i.e. 'sometimes'...
   I've searched about how long it takes for this to happen but nothing showed up - does anyone know how long it takes before posts drop off. Is it after a period of time or is it due to the amount of content in the blog? Do you get advance notification that your posts will fade away?
   Ive only had a blog for a few months and I really don't want to go through the effort of changing to a new theme just because of this without knowing how long it will take before my posts will cease to exist and I don't want to have to spend time each month looking to see what, if anything, has disappeared. - so can anyone explain how this works?

   The blog I need help with is julieinbali.wordpress.com.

2. timethief
   Member
   Oct 20, 2011, 5:52 PM

   You control how many posts are displayed on the front page of your blog. The setting is found here > Settings > Reading
   Blog pages show at most __ posts
   "Save Changes"
   Be cautious not to set too many as the more posts there are on your front page the slower pages loading time becomes for visitors. Page loading time is a page ranking factor and studies demonstrate the average person is not going to wait longer than 3 - 4 seconds for a site to load.

3. thesacredpath
   Member
   Oct 20, 2011, 6:11 PM

   How long it take for a post to disappear from the main page depends on the setting that Timethief references and how often you post. The iTheme2 theme allows you to "feature" certain posts if you wish to keep them around on the main page longer if that is desired. Sometimes a post will end up very popular and a great discussion will ensue in the comments, or that post will end up getting lots of views over a longer period of time and those types of posts you might wish to set as a "featured" post. Featured posts can also be used to showcase older posts that perhaps because of some recent events or something, you want to bring those back to the main page.

4. julieinbali
   Member
   Oct 21, 2011, 2:33 PM

   Thanks so much for the replies.
   timethief cautions about how many posts to set and I note that the default setting was 10. I have upped it to 100 but it can take many thousands - so I presume it will take at least hundreds of posts, if not thousands, before the page loading time gets affected - is that right?

5. auxclass
   Member
   Oct 21, 2011, 2:49 PM

   I have upped it to 100 but it can take many thousands - so I presume it will take at least hundreds of posts, if not thousands, before the page loading time gets affected - is that right?

   Wrong - 10 is a good number - forcing your regular visitors to load a ton of stuff they have already read is a recipe for no visitors - 100 should insure that you irritate your declining visitor base - even if you were my bestest friend I would only visit your site with 100 Posts on the front page under if I was under threat of dire physical damage to me.

   You want your pages to snap when they load you have only 2 to 4 seconds before most people will bail from a site that is not loading - don't irritate your regular visitors - use the more tag on long posts -

6. auxclass
   Member
   Oct 21, 2011, 2:50 PM

   PS - if not noted above - Google takes page loading time into account for it' search rankings - the longer to load the lower the ranking.

7. julieinbali
   Member
   Oct 21, 2011, 5:08 PM

   Thanks, I totally get your point.... however, it dawns on me that it is my fundamental misinterpretation about this that has caused me concern - oops! I'm still very new to blogging so the terminology still hasn't sunk in yet and I have a lot to learn!

   When I read that 'posts sometimes fade away' I didn't pay attention to 'where' they fade away from. So I assumed that my posts might be affected, but you all highlighting the bit about the front page/home page/main page has made me realise there is no problem as I have 7 categories and my posts are all 'under' those categories, not on the 'front page', so presumably they wont fade away. Thanks for showing me this - sorry to waste your time with a dumb question, doh!

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