A Refreshed Reader for 2017

Reader is WordPress.com’s city sq., the place you possibly can comply with your favourite websites and skim them in a distraction-free atmosphere. We’ve been engaged on a refresh for months, and we’re thrilled to share it with you immediately. For readers, we hope these adjustments will shock and delight you, including extra range to your stream and exposing you to posts you’ll love. And for writers, we need to put your superior work in entrance of a complete new viewers.

A Simplified Design

We would like Reader to really feel like you possibly can cozy up with, so we’ve streamlined the design, that includes clear textual content on a easy white background. We’ve additionally elevated the knowledge density so you possibly can see extra of the websites you’re keen on with much less scrolling.

New Publish Layouts

There’s an enormous number of content material in Reader. We need to make sure that it appears nice it doesn’t matter what, so the structure now responds to what’s within the publish. For instance, posts with a lot of imagery will get the Gallery structure, which highlights the primary 4 photographs.

gallery-example

A publish with a picture and little or no textual content will get the Photograph structure, letting the visuals take heart stage.

photo-example

Reader is now higher at selecting which media to point out — like lots of you may have requested, it’ll begin searching for media on the high of every publish. If the primary media is a YouTube video, we’ll present the video within the stream — simply click on the picture to look at. We’ll be making use of the identical structure to different video providers quickly.

video-example

Writers don’t need to do something new to make use of these layouts. Reader will mechanically choose the structure that makes your publish look its finest.

Spiffed-Up Tag Pages

Tag pages are an ideal place to search out a wide range of voices on a topic you care about. Along with the brand new publish layouts, every tag web page now options a picture from one of many high tagged posts. This makes the pages extra enjoyable, and it’s one other likelihood in your posts to get observed (trace: tagging your posts and together with a big picture is all the time a good suggestion). Each header picture has a credit score that hyperlinks to the publish, after all.

tag-example

You already know you possibly can comply with tags, too, proper? Click on Comply with Tag on the high of any tag web page and it’ll be added to your Tags checklist within the sidebar.

Advisable Posts

There are hundreds of thousands of wonderful posts flowing by means of WordPress.com day-after-day that you simply by no means see, and we need to deliver a number of of them to your consideration, so we’re including a little bit of serendipity. We name it Advisable Posts.

rec-posts-example

This new part will present up in Reader intermittently — extra for brand new members, much less for present members who already comply with a whole lot of websites. You can too see Advisable Posts on the Search page.

The suggestions are chosen by a singular collaboration between editors and algorithms. As a brand new member, your suggestions will largely come from our Editors’ PicksAs you comply with, like, and touch upon blogs, the algorithm will advocate different posts we hope you’ll like.

If a advice appears promising, click on or faucet to learn it. In the event you take pleasure in it, click on the star to love it, and we’ll maintain that in thoughts for future suggestions. And in case you don’t like a advice, click on the X icon to dismiss it, and we’ll maintain that in thoughts, too.

Writers, simply maintain doing what you’re already doing and your work may get advisable, too!


As all the time, this can be a work in progress. These adjustments shall be coming to the WordPress cell apps quickly, and we’ll be tweaking and enhancing alongside the way in which. We’ve bought some actually thrilling stuff arising.

Give the refreshed Reader a strive! WordPress.com members can discover it in the usual spot. Not a member but? Join us.

What do you consider all these updates? Tell us within the feedback. And thanks, as all the time, for being a part of the WordPress.com group.

Filed underneath: Features, Reading, WordPress.com