Display Most Recently Updated Posts and Pages

Are you looking for a way to show most recently updated posts and pages? While there’s probably a plugin for this, we have created a quick code snippet that you can use to display most recently updated posts and pages in WordPress.

Instructions:

All you have to do is add this code to any theme’s file or in a site-specific plugin:

<?php
     $today = current_time('mysql', 1);
     $howMany = 5;

     if ( $recentposts = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT ID, post_title FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_status = 'publish' AND post_modified_gmt < '$today' ORDER BY post_modified_gmt DESC LIMIT $howMany")):
?>
<h2><?php _e("Recent Updates"); ?></h2>
<ul>
<?php
foreach ($recentposts as $post) {
     if ($post->post_title == '') $post->post_title = sprintf(__('Post #%s'), $post->ID);
     echo "<li><a href='".get_permalink($post->ID)."'>";
     the_title();
     echo '</a></li>';
}
?>
</ul>
<?php endif; ?>

Note: If this is your first time adding code snippets in WordPress, then please refer to our guide on how to properly copy / paste code snippets in WordPress, so you don’t accidentally break your site.

If you liked this code snippet, please consider checking out our other articles on the site like: 10 best WordPress testimonial plugins to add social proof and how to create a WordPress form with a date picker.