Display modes

Appearance → Customize → Blog → Display.

The three modes

Stacked (default)

One post per row, in reading order: meta line, title, featured image, excerpt. The image sits above the text at the full width of the column.

The classic blog. It gives each post the most room and the largest picture, and it is the only display where the entry can be centred — see Stacked alignment.

Pairs with the Narrow layout.

List

One post per row, image on the left, text beside it. The image takes 38% of the row.

Denser than stacked, but each post still gets a full line, so titles have room to breathe. The best default for an archive somebody is scanning — a category page, an author page.

Pairs with a sidebar layout, or full width.

Grid

Cards in columns, image on top. Two to six columns on desktop, with separate counts for tablet and phone.

Most posts on a screen, most visual. Right for photography, recipes, anything where the picture is doing the selling. Wrong for posts with long titles and no featured images, where it becomes a grid of empty boxes.

Pairs with Full width.

What changes between them

The excerpt lengths differ because the text box differs: 60 words in a grid card is a wall. You can override all three with one number under Excerpt length.

The crops differ for the same reason, and you can force one shape everywhere under Thumbnails.

What stays the same

• The meta row — date, categories, comment count — and whether it reads above or below the title.
• Excerpt or full content.
• Every Design → Blog styling choice: title font and colour, meta font and colour, excerpt colour, thumbnail border and radius.
• The Pinned post label on a sticky post.

Where it does not apply

Search results run their own compact result markup and ignore the display mode — see Header search.

Single posts are not a listing.