On your main posts page, recent posts are normally displayed in reverse chronological order (latest at the top). A sticky is a post that overrides this order: no matter what its date, it will show up above the most recent post.
The option is found if you click the “Visibility” tab in the Publish module of the post editor screen (see relevant Support doc). It’s buried there because in the past (when the rather misleading phrase “Stick this post to the front page” was more prominent) many beginners thought their posts wouldn’t show up on the main page unless they ticked that option; so they ticked it for each and every post they published – which completely messes the blog up: the option is meant to be used for one post.
A blog is more user friendly if a visitor —especially a returning visitor— can immediately see what’s new when landing on the main page, without having to scroll down. So a sticky should be used only if and when necessary, and it should be short; it’s best used for a temporary announcement: not for a permanent introduction to the blog (use a static page instead), not for showcasing important posts (use links to them in a text widget instead). Exception: themes with a featured post slider (marked *** below).
Note that a few themes provide another option for publishing an announcement above your posts: “Notice” in iNove, “Welcome message” in Modularity Lite, “Homepage Notice” in Titan, “Alert Box” in Vigilance (all under Appearance > Theme Options), text widget to Header area in Clean Home or text widget to Front Page Intro in Inuit Types (both under Appearance > Widgets). Related feature: “Information” in Monochrome (Appearance > Theme Options; shows up in sidebar, top position).
Due to its special nature, in most themes a sticky is highlighted in some way:
| Adventure Journal | colored bg + no date and author |
| Albeo | very light grey bg |
| Ambiru | very light grey bg |
| Beach | cream bg + no date and author |
| Bold Life | grey bg + no date and comment tab |
| Chaos Theory | black bg |
| Chunk | grey bg + no date |
| Comet | light grey bg + no date and author |
| Coraline | light yellow bg (light scheme) dark grey bg (dark scheme) + no date |
| Dusk | lighter bg |
| Emire | lighter bg + “LATEST” in green star before title |
| Enterprise | light grey bg |
| Fleur de Lys | light grey bg |
| Freshy | light grey bg |
| Green Marinée | light grey bg |
| Greenery | very light brown bg |
| Grid Focus | grey bg |
| iNove | light grey bg + grey bg to title |
| K2-Lite | light grey bg |
| Kubrick | light grey bg |
| Light | light grey bg |
| Misty Look | light grey bg |
| MLB (all three) | light grey bg |
| Monochrome | light grey bg + border |
| Motion | darker bg |
| Neat | light grey bg |
| Ocean Mist | light blue bg |
| Oulipo | grey (in “light scheme” only) |
| Pilcrow | darker bg + no date |
| Pressrow | light grey bg |
| Regulus | light grey bg |
| Rubric | light grey bg |
| Shocking Blue Green | light grey bg |
| Simpla | light grey bg |
| Solipsus | lighter bg |
| Spring Loaded | slightly darker bg |
| Steira | light blue bg + “NEW” tab |
| Strange Little Town | lighter bg + no date and author |
| The Morning After | light grey bg + blue title |
| Triton Lite | white bg |
| Twenty Ten | light blue bg |
| Twenty-eight Thirteen | light grey bg + line under metadata |
| Under the Influence | light grey bg + title italics |
| Unsleepable | light grey bg |
| Vigilance | colored bg (see here) |
| White as Milk | light grey bg |
| WordPress Classic | light grey bg |
| Andreas 04 | black |
| Andreas 09 | black |
| Banana Smoothie | orange |
| Benevolence | black |
| Black-Letterhead | dashed grey |
| Fauna | black |
| Greyzed | dashed black |
| Nishita | grey, + around title, + no date, categories, comments |
| Notepad | brown, dotted |
| Reddle | + no date and metadata |
| Retro-fitted | border left + faint bg color to post |
| Sunburn | grey |
| Toni | blue |
| Almost Spring | greyish bg |
| Blix | white title on turquoise bg |
| Connections | black title + black bg to date |
| Contempt | blue bg |
| Day Dream | title bold + light grey bg |
| DePo Masthead | red line under title |
| Digg 3 Column | white title on blue bg |
| Fjords 04 | white title on blue bg |
| Flower Power | grey bg |
| Fresh Bananas | light grey bg |
| Garland | white title on blue bg |
| Girl in Green | lighter bg |
| Iceburgg | white title on blue bg |
| Jentri | white title on redbrown bg |
| Matala | darker bg color, pin image |
| Mystique [*] | title larger size |
| Neo-Sapien | red bg |
| Ocadia | light blue bg |
| Parament | orange bg + no date, category and comment tabs |
| Pool | white title on blue bg |
| Quentin | divider line above and below title |
| Rounded | white title on green bg |
| Sapphire | double line under title |
| Silver is the New Black | white title on brown bg |
| Supposedly Clean | light gey bg |
| Sweet Blossoms | white title on pink bg |
| Tarski | white title on blue bg |
| The Journalist v1.3 | grey bg |
| The Journalist v1.9 | grey bg |
| Thirteen | green bg |
| Treba | title larger size |
| Vermilion Christmas | white title on red bg |
[*] If with featured image: no date, title preceded by “Featured” (editable), full-width image, no content on front page, excerpt on hover over.
| Autofocus | full-width image, no date |
| Blogum | no date, replaced by “Featured” |
| Bouquet | no date |
| Brand New Date | no date |
| Bueno | no date |
| Chateau | no date, replaced by “Featured” |
| Choco | no date + title underlined |
| Clean Home | colored bar below post |
| Dusk to Dawn | no date and author, replaced by “Featured” |
| Elegant Grunge | extra greyish bg image below post |
| Esquire | no date |
| Fresh & Clean [***] | “Featured” above title |
| Fruit Shake | no date |
| Fusion | olive bg to post metadata |
| Imbalance 2 | no date, replaced by “Featured” |
| iTheme2 [***] | no date |
| Manifest | no date, replaced by “Featured” |
| Next Saturday | date bullet red instead of yellow |
| Nuntius [***] | Darker bar above and below post |
| Piano Black | no date + title capitalized |
| Pink Touch 2 | no date, replaced by “Featured” |
| Quintus | no date |
| Rusty Grunge | no date & author + beige vertical bar left |
| Selecta [***] | showcased below header (if enabled in Appearance > Theme Options) |
| Shaan | featured image (if you’ve set one) above title |
| Skeptical | no date, replaced by “Featured” – also showcased in footer |
| Suburbia | double width column + no date, replaced by “Featured” |
| Sundance [***] | title in italics, date replaced by “Featured” |
| Sunspot [***] | “Featured” added to post metadata |
| Twenty Eleven [***] | “Featured Post” heading above post |
| Wu Wei | no date |
| zBench | orange title + light grey bg to post + grey border around post |
| Andrea |
| Chaotic Soul |
| Dark Wood |
| DePo Square |
| Duotone |
| Duster |
| Fadtastic |
| Forever [***] |
| Hemingway |
| Inuit Types |
| Koi |
| Liquorice |
| Modularity Lite |
| Neutra |
| NotesIL |
| P2 |
| Paperpunch |
| Prologue |
| Redoable Lite |
| Retro MacOS |
| Sandbox (all four) |
| Shaan (if you set no featured image to the post) |
| Spectrum |
| Splendio [***] |
| Structure |
| Titan |
| Toolbox |
| Vertigo |
| Vostok |
(* If you’re using one of these themes, and you wish to make a sticky stand out, see my posts on borders, background color, and font color.)
| Monotone |
[***] Multiple stickies: slider in the header area. In most of these themes the stickies need to have a featured image. In Sundance they need to be in the video post format.
I believe that raincoaster provided some additional insight as to why having a permanent sticky post is not a good idea from an SEO perspective. In some themes what happens is the search bots assume there is no new content.
Posted by timethief | March 28, 2010, 03:43Ah yes, thanks! I must add this to the post.
Posted by Panos | March 28, 2010, 03:49Although it’s a cool idea, I have a hard time seeing benefit in the sticky post. And I’ve never seen one on an actual blog so far!
Posted by Sandra Lee | March 28, 2010, 09:48@Sandra Lee: Yes, I think it’s an almost useless gimmick.
Here’s a couple of good examples:
http://ronsrants.wordpress.com/
http://buyathread.wordpress.com/
And here’s what you’d better not do:
http://livingmoonastrology.wordpress.com/
(It would have been a sticky, but the blogger is right in not liking the non-customizable blue title bar you get in Garland, so she has resorted to keeping that post at the top by changing its date all the time.)
And here’s an example of the alternative option (Titan notice):
http://wpxpert.wordpress.com/
Posted by Panos | March 28, 2010, 15:31Those are excellent examples. Thanks so much.
Posted by Sandra Lee | March 28, 2010, 23:51You’re welcome!
Posted by Panos | March 29, 2010, 05:24My blog is calendar / schedule based, so each post has a custom field for the event date. Then I use sticky posts to move to the top any post (read event) that is scheduled for that day.
I am working on the code to query the meta-data for a date match, and if found, to automatically mark the post as sticky.
Posted by Michael | April 21, 2010, 06:20@Michael: Yours is a special case, but anyway you’re using stickies the way I consider good: both temporary and short (as I’m mentioning in the post). And your front page looks very elegant.
Posted by Panos | April 21, 2010, 14:11Hi, I am Paola from livingmoonastrology. You are right i don’t like the blue banner on Garland when I make my logo into a sticky post, and there is no editable banner in Garland. But i like Garland for many other reasons.
Do you have a better suggestion? Do you think I should use a Front Page? I don’t like them because the newer contents aren’t obvious to me.
Is the way I’m doing it (changing dates on my banner every time I post something new) detrimental to my net exposure? I am new to blogging. I know little, willing to learn. Thanks for your help, Paola Emma
Posted by livingmoonastrology | June 30, 2010, 03:14Hi Paola. Obviously I like Garland too, mainly because of the color customizing and the left and right sidebars.
Changing the date of posts in general would be terrible for your traffic, but changing the date of that one only is no big deal. Setting your blog front to display a static page would be worse (search engines like renewed content on the front page).
Unfortunately I don’t have a better suggestion. In theory I could create a whitish mask to hide the sticky title and date, but in practice it wouldn’t be perfect. (If you care about the technicalities, that’s because the white bg around the title and date area isn’t exactly white, it’s a gradient from light grey to white, and because a mask positioned in front of that area won’t show up at exactly the same height in all browsers, so the mask itself would be slightly visible).
No better suggestion, that is, unless you’re willing to spend money: you can easily delete the blue stripe if you buy the CSS upgrade. But I don’t think it’s worth buying it just for that.
By the way, I had sent a ticket to WP staff telling them that since Garland is color customizable, that stripe should be color customizable too. Reply was rather disappointing: first they asked me to explain what I meant, as they weren’t aware of anything special for sticky posts in Garland (!), and when I did they told me they would consider it for future upgrades…
Posted by Panos | June 30, 2010, 04:43Thank you for this interesting post. Would you know how to change the background color which is by default blue it seems for the stickies in the new wp theme that has come out ? It is blue and I want it to be white. I realize this post was about the fact that sticky posts are not advised generally but I am curious if there is a way to change the color of it! Thanks. Deb
Posted by Miracle 2 | October 28, 2010, 14:40@Deb: I need to know the URL of your wp.com blog, and I need to know what theme you’re referring to: the latest additions, Elegant Grunge and zBench, don’t have a blue bg to stickies. Also, do you have the CSS upgrade?
Posted by Panos | October 28, 2010, 15:03Elegant Grunge does, in fact, slightly differentiate: a sticky post has a distinctive ornament beneath it, see http://elegantgrungedemo.wordpress.com/.
Posted by perttuk | October 21, 2011, 16:35You mean that grey thing below the post. I guess I hadn’t noticed it when I examined the theme, or maybe I considered it too insignificant. In either case my classification is wrong – I’ll have to move EG to “Other”. Thanks!
Posted by Panos | October 21, 2011, 20:57Hi – I’m afraid I would like to use a sticky post in Comet, but I’m finding that although it’s published as a sticky, it doesn’t stay at the top, nor does it have the format & lack of author that stickies apparently should have in Comet. Any ideas what might be causing that?
Posted by socsecsue | November 22, 2011, 20:38Sounds like it has not been made sticky. But I can’t tell without a link to the blog in question.
Posted by Panos | November 22, 2011, 22:26Oh dear, I was hoping you wouldn’t say that – it’s a right mess, but here you go; it’s http://www.rmclubnational2012.info. I’ve used a custom menu, showing categories, & the one with the sticky is the first Accommodation one. I published one post, called Accommodation (& made that a sticky), then two others called updates.
Thanks
Posted by socsecsue | November 22, 2011, 23:07How could I possibly not say that? I cannot make a diagnosis with seeing the patient!
So: as the very first phrase of my posts says, stickies work on your main posts page, not on category pages. Main posts page is usually the blog front. When you’ve set your front to display a static page instead, you can create another (blank) page and set it as your posts page (in Settings > Reading): that’s the page where stickies will show up as expected.
Posted by Panos | November 23, 2011, 00:51OK – thank you Dr Panos! Unfortunately, I had hoped to use stickies on more than one category page as an introduction to the posts on that page, so that’s that idea gone. I’ll re-read your advice in your first post about intro notices and experiment tomorrow.
Thanks again for your help
Posted by socsecsue | November 23, 2011, 01:11You’re welcome.
The intro notices some themes support are also for the blog front only. What you can do is turn your static front page into a more detailed guide to your site: add your introductions to the content of the page. Or add them in a text widget at the top of your sidebar.
Posted by Panos | November 23, 2011, 03:47