Stand with Your blog is a place people come to in order to find some answers, advice or interesting facts. All of the blog posts are viewed by different people and, definitely, some are more popular than others.
Magento 2 Blog popular posts — are the blog posts widget in the sidebar that is generated from the number of view counts on the blog post view page.
To configure Blog Popular Posts in Magento 2:
1. Go to the Stores > Configuration > Magefan Extensions > Blog > Sidebar and find Popular Posts Widget section.
2. Enable the widget.
3. Select the Template for the blog popular posts.
Note: Modern template is available only in Blog Extra.
4. Choose whether to Display Post Image. Even if you set the featured image when creating a blog post, it won't be displayed if this option is disabled.
5. Specify the Number of Posts you want to be displayed in the Popular Posts.
6. Set the Sort Order to manage the position of the widget on the Storefront. The higher the number, the lower it will be displayed on the Sidebar.
Once you finish don't forget to Save Config and flush Magento cache.
7. Check the blog Popular Posts on the storefront.
As we've already mentioned, popular posts are generated based on the views count. The views count, correspondingly, is generated automatically.
So, you don't have any control over the posts displayed in the popular posts widget, do you?
Not quite. You can set the view counts manually on blog post editing page. This way you can define the popular blog posts displayed on the sidebar, same as with the featured blog posts and other sidebar widgets.