A Redesigned Reader Experience

December 12, 2022

Dave Martin

If you’ve recently visited the WordPress.com Reader, you may have noticed some aesthetic improvements. Today we’re giving you a quick visual tour of those changes and inviting you to check out our new and improved Reader if it’s been a while. Let’s jump in!

Streamlined Consistency

Each of the individual cards within the reader have been redesigned to better highlight the content you’re sharing with your audience. Images and videos have been enlarged, padding and margins have been improved, and the general layout has been adjusted across all content types to provide a consistent reading experience.

Updated Layouts

A number of the layouts within the WordPress.com reader have been streamlined on desktop and mobile web to make browsing and discovering new content easier.

Grid Aligned

You might not notice this at first glance, but a consistent grid has been applied to the entire layout to make it easier for your eyes to scan content and scroll through your entire feed.

First of Many Improvements

This is the first of many improvements that we hope to make to the reader over the next year. If you have additional feedback on improvements we might make, please share them in the comments below and stay tuned for additional updates.

Take me to the Reader!

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41 Comments

Comments are closed.

  1. Fat Geisha Dec 12th at 7:55 pm

    Awesome, I love WordPress improvements.

    Liked by 7 people

  2. entatrendy Dec 12th at 8:03 pm

    That’s nice to see. I really love this

    Liked by 6 people

  3. Michelle Dec 12th at 8:07 pm

    I’m liking things so far.

    Liked by 8 people

  4. L.K. Latham Dec 12th at 8:13 pm

    Looking good!

    Liked by 11 people

  5. Bon Repos Gites Dec 12th at 8:18 pm

    Last week’s changes were more noticeable than the ones made in October (I think!) and while the overall experience still seems good, I would love the option of switching off the distracting ‘Followers’ column on the right hand side 😉
    Compliments of the season and thanks for all the good work behind the scenes!

    Liked by 8 people

    • Dave Martin Dec 13th at 1:30 pm

      Thanks for the kind words and feedback! An option to switch off the right sidebar is not a bad idea! I’ve added it to our list of follow up issues to consider.

      Liked by 6 people

  6. Expressive Communications Dec 12th at 9:19 pm

    I keep getting emails from you. Is this because I have an old blog that I had forgotten about?? Lol

    Sent from my iPhone

    >

    Liked by 3 people

  7. JanBeek Dec 12th at 9:33 pm

    Thank you for constantly trying to make WP better. I appreciate you. 👍🏽❤️

    Liked by 8 people

  8. Ms. Liz Dec 12th at 11:18 pm

    I’m not at all pleased about sites I’m following being listed down the RHS, cluttering up my screen. I don’t need and don’t want this. Please stop imposing your ideas of what *you* think is a good idea on me, who hates the idea. If you do stuff like that you should provide for me to turn that feature off. I hate it and have already complained through the Help Chat. If you keep doing this sort of thing I’ll be leaving WordPress.

    Liked by 4 people

  9. Mellow Curmudgeon Dec 13th at 12:43 am

    I had noticed that Reader looks better lately. Thanks.

    I have 2 suggestions for additional improvements; will put them in separate comments.

    Liked by 3 people

  10. Mellow Curmudgeon Dec 13th at 12:43 am

    **** Hide button ****

    In addition to the buttons for visiting or liking posts displayed by Reader, it would be good to have a Hide button. I am often using Reader in situations where I could be interrupted. I need to postpone reading or commenting on posts that are longish and thought-provoking. By the time I can give such a post the attention it deserves, it is far down and hard to find, in the chronological list presented to me by Reader. If I could hide recent posts that I have already finished considering, it would be much easier to find those that I had to postpone considering.

    Liked by 5 people

  11. Mellow Curmudgeon Dec 13th at 12:44 am

    **** Excerpts ****

    If the author of a post chooses to write an excerpt, then the text of the excerpt should be the text that Reader displays, no more and no less. A few years ago, I was shocked to find that Reader always ignored my excerpt and insisted on displaying the first few lines of the body of any post that had (and needed!) an excerpt, no matter how inappropriate those lines might be.

    When I complained about this perverse behavior in 2019-04, I was told that we are stuck with it. Since Reader is getting a lot of work anyway, maybe that fatalism can be revisited. BTW, it has been a while since I posted something that needed an excerpt. If the bug has already been fixed w/o fanfare, I am grateful to whoever did it.

    Liked by 4 people

    • Eoin Dec 13th at 11:45 am

      Good news on this front. This has been addressed with these recent changes. If the author has added a custom excerpt, the reader will default to this content. If you see something contrary to this, please get in touch. Thanks for the feedback.

      Liked by 3 people

  12. gistwitch Dec 13th at 5:41 am

    Wow this is great
    Keep it up we love you 💓

    Liked by 7 people

  13. Spira Dec 13th at 10:25 am

    Thank you for the work towards improving our experience with WP reader.
    If I may suggest one thing:
    I remember that at some point you have introduced something like a card bundling multiple daily posts from the same blog; I don’t see it applied ( maybe due to the time limit between posts?).
    It would be helpful to have that as I find that my Reader clutters from prolific writers, hence making it a chore to find the posts from the ones who write less frequently.

    Liked by 5 people

  14. Thiago Dec 13th at 12:57 pm

    O love the Reader. I Just want the “save” Button that we have in the APP in the browser version.

    Liked by 8 people

  15. ShankySalty Dec 13th at 3:57 pm

    Love this❤❤

    Liked by 4 people

  16. Eugenia Dec 13th at 4:00 pm

    Wow! This is awesome!

    Liked by 3 people

  17. Ms. Liz Dec 14th at 10:35 pm

    Further to Mellow Curmudgeon’s request for a ‘hide’ button.. I have the same problem outlined by MC. Posts I don’t have time for (but do want to read) disappear way down the list very fast and are hard to find again. While I like the new presentation of posts in the Reader, each entry appears to take up significantly more screen space than previously. For this reason I’d like to be able to toggle between displaying posts the new way and the old way, the old way being quicker to scroll down. [Note: my alt idea to MC’s would be.. the ability to ‘pin’ posts at the top of the feed for ease of retrieval.] Thanks.

    Liked by 2 people

  18. NASRIN PARVIN Dec 15th at 5:51 am

    This is a nice improvement by WordPress

    Liked by 4 people

  19. Connect Dec 15th at 6:08 am

    Looking good

    Liked by 2 people

  20. Francis.R. Dec 16th at 2:29 am

    Thanks for the improvements, sadly the new reader doesn’t work in my default Opera browser. I don’t have activated adblockers.

    Liked by 3 people

  21. christiankeiter Dec 17th at 7:47 pm

    hello

    Liked by 1 person

  22. NETBID TV Dec 18th at 1:36 am

    Nice💓❣️💓❣️

    Liked by 2 people

  23. Asrashakir Dec 23rd at 6:45 pm

    That’s a feasible and creative change in here♡

    Liked by 2 people

  24. Samuel Dec 25th at 9:08 am

    It’s been a long time since I used WordPress Reader. Last time I did, some websites don’t allow you to view the entire post. Some RSS clients let you fetch the complete post in one click, without leaving the app. Such an option would be nice in Reader.

    Liked by 1 person

  25. abadooz Dec 26th at 5:59 pm

    great job

    Liked by 2 people

  26. Thiago Dec 28th at 11:57 am

    WP’s Reader has all the potential to be what Google Reader was going to be: a social network with relevant content. Substack and Tumblr have moved in that direction, but here the potential seems greater.

    Liked by 3 people

  27. brantleycolin Dec 31st at 9:20 am

    this is great to see the redesign of reader experience

    Liked by 3 people

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