Fixed entries or "sticky posts" are posts in which we have marked the option for them to always be displayed at the beginning of all the lists. It is a useful but very dangerous feature that is often very misunderstood by our customers.
First of all, this feature of being able to leave a pinned post at the beginning of our listings ("pin it to the top of the blog") is not the same as "highlighting" the post. When we make a post fixed or sticky, it is prioritized in the query of our database, so its date or sorting criteria are ignored.
A practical case in which it may be advisable to make a “sticky” or “fixed” post on the home page could be an important announcement or an error note from the editor, something that is a high priority for your users.
What frequently happens is that due to ignorance, we add posts of this type, but we do NOT remove them. If we accumulate many posts with this feature activated, we are making a mess, and our site will go slower and slower.
The problem is that the option is not very visible, it is found in the publication options, but then there is nothing else that visually tells us in our backend that the post is "pinned."
If we accumulate many posts with this feature activated, we are making a mess, and our site will go slower and slower.
As always, "there's a plugin for that", and it's one of those plugins that I've found really useful. In fact, I don't know why this has not been integrated into the WordPress core, because accumulating sticky posts is very, very dangerous in terms of performance.
The plugin, once installed and activated, will add a column in the admin of our posts or custom posts types, which will tell us if the post is a fixed entry or not. From here, the column will be sortable, and not only this, we can also edit using the batch editor or bulk editor, this feature, thus being able to remove the "sticky" from many posts at the same time.
In a real field case, once a client of mine who had a very large, powerful blog that generated a lot of income, had the problem that his site was extremely slow, even though he had 1000 active caching and optimization systems. The initial response to loading your page was very slow. When we analyzed the queries made by its page, we saw that it had hundreds of fixed entries, which were accumulated with the most recent entries, so quite a stir was created.
I remember that we solved it by attacking the database directly, changing the option to all those posts. This is because WordPress does not come standard with a way to change this option in batch.
With this plugin, you will have at hand a feature that you could almost say can “save lives”. Very, very useful in terms of maintaining blogs with many posts, since it usually happens that, since they are blogs with several collaborators, people "do it" and no one realizes what they are "getting into".
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