WordPress’ WP_Query has orderby=rand parameter to make WP_Query displays random posts1 but there’s no native parameter to randomly displays WP_Query posts output2 inside The Loop. I faced this need and found a workaround for that:

  1. Get a WP_Query object using parameters you want
  2. Assuming you’re using $posts as the variable of your WP_Query object, the posts data that will be used for ‘The Loop’ can be accessed at $posts->posts.
  3. Store and convert $posts->posts into array so you can shuffle the order of the posts
  4. Shuffle the “array”-ed posts
  5. Convert the shuffled posts into object
  6. Assign back the shuffled posts object to $posts->posts
  7. Now you can start outputing the object using “the loop”

Here’s how it looks in form of code:

 

  1. E.g. assuming you have 100 posts, this will display random posts from those 100 posts ↩

  2. E.g. You want to get 10 latests posts but you want to display it in random order ↩

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