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WordPress—A Complete Guide

Creating a Custom Query

Explore how to create and implement custom queries in WordPress using WP_Query. Understand how to customize post listings on different pages, fetch specific content, and reset queries to enhance theme functionality and data display.

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Custom queries are a powerful feature of WordPress that allow you to display the data on a page in whatever way you want.

We have already seen how the default query works in WordPress. The while loop on every template file that we have worked on so far iterates on the data returned by the default query. For example, the while loop in index.php fetches blog posts and displays the titles of ten most recent posts by default.

<?php
while(have_posts()){
  the_post();
  echo the_title();
}
while loop in index.php

If we want to display five posts on the page, a crude solution would be to change the "Blog pages show at most" option from the admin sidebar’s "Readings" setting. But this is a global change and affects not just the blog listing but all pages on the website (like the event and course listings).

A custom query is used to alter the behavior of the default query. We can use a custom query to change the number of posts on the index.php file only.

1. Set up query arguments

To set up a custom query, we need to give it some arguments. These arguments tell WordPress what data to fetch from the database. The WP_Query class takes a number of parameters ...