How To Insert A Latest Post Link In Your Blog Posts

One of the challenges in creating a content heavy website, is about retaining your visitors. When you have a lot of posts, chances are that a reader will be interested in more than just the current article. Of course, a well-crafted piece of content will have internal links to all parts of your site, and all relevant articles. But there are many automated strategies. One of them is having a “latest post link” towards the very end.

Plugins like “Related posts” and others also serve the same purpose. In this article, I’ll give you an easy code snippet to place into your functions.php file, that will create a link to the latest post.

Code Snippet for the Latest Post Link

Open your functions.php file and paste the following code into it:

function link_to_most_recent_post($content) {
     $latest_link = last_post_link();
    return $content .= $latest_link;
 }
 add_filter( 'the_content', 'link_to_most_recent_post');
 function last_post_link(){
     global $post;
     $current_permalink = get_permalink();
     $placeholder = $post;
     $args = array(
         'numberposts'     => 2,
         'offset'          => 0,
         'orderby'         => 'post_date',
         'order'           => 'DESC',
         'post_status'     => 'publish' );
     $sorted_posts = get_posts( $args );
     $permalink = get_permalink($sorted_posts[0]->ID);
     $title = $sorted_posts[0]->post_title;
     if ($permalink == $current_permalink) {
         $permalink = get_permalink($sorted_posts[1]->ID);
         $title = $sorted_posts[1]->post_title;
     }
     $post = $placeholder;
     $latest_link_html = 'Latest Post: <a href="'.$permalink.'">'.$title.'</a>';
     return $latest_link_html;
 }

If you’re unfamiliar with how to do this, check out NameHero’s knowledgebase article on inserting code snippets into WordPress. This piece of code does the following:

1. Gets the two latest published posts sorted by date
2. Checks to see if the current post is the latest post
3. If so, places a link to the second latest post at the end of the content
4. If not, places a link to the latest post

It’s an easy solution that automatically leverages your most recent post to grab your visitor’s attention. Here’s a screenshot of the solution in action after adding the above code:

If you want, you can modify the code to add a class and then style it appropriately via CSS.

Tracking the Efficacy of the Link

One of the biggest challenges when implementing any new feature, is to test and see if it’s working. A ruthless “test everything” strategy is your best option when it comes to maximizing your website interaction. Otherwise, you risk adding a ton of features that no-one uses, causing clutter, and a slowing down of your site.

Tracking internal link clicks like the one above requires a slight modification of the code. In the line after the “if” tag, just before “$post = $placeholder”, type the following:

 $permalink=$permalink.'?referrer=latest'; 

This will create a query string variable with the key being “referrer” and a value of “latest”. Now you can use this with your analytics tool like Google Analytics, which will report different URLs for every query string. If you see your page URLs containing this referrer, it means that people are clicking on the latest post link and your experiment is a success.

If not, you should either remove it, or change the placement – something to make it more prominent!

Latest Links are Only One Piece of the Puzzle

Remember that visitors need to be enticed to stay in a variety of ways. You should always be on the lookout for opportunities to plug your links. For example, in this very article, I included a link to a previous post about inserting custom code snippets. An efficient way to include related posts, posts with the most comments, and showing category based related posts are all potential solutions that you can try.

Just remember to always track your features to see if they’re being used. And if not, get rid of them!