Featured Sticky Post Articles

Hi @rayeason,

Thanks for reaching out and for the screenshots, those were really helpful!

After checking your site and the screenshots, I can see what is happening. The posts showing in the first row (More Dodger Blues, The Body Snatchers Part Two, Body Snatchers Part One) are marked as Sticky in WordPress. When sticky posts are enabled, WordPress prepends them to the top of the results AND still fetches the configured number of regular posts (3 in your case), giving you 3 sticky + 3 regular = 6 posts total.

The Elementor editor preview does not apply sticky post behavior, which is why it shows only 3 posts there.

To fix this, you have two options:

1. Go to Posts > All Posts, find those older posts, and unmark them as sticky if they no longer need to be featured.
2. Or check the widget’s Query settings for an Ignore Sticky Posts option and enable it, which will make the widget treat all posts equally and return only the 3 most recent ones.

The stale content in the editor is a separate issue. Please try going to Elementor > Tools > Regenerate CSS & Data and clearing your cache afterwards.

Let us know if this helps!

Best regards,
Dhruv – UAE Support Team

Hi @rayeason,

Apologies for the confusion in our previous reply.

The correct workaround is to add the following code to your theme’s functions.php file:

add_action( 'pre_get_posts', function( $query ) {
    if ( ! is_admin() && ! $query->is_main_query() && is_front_page() ) {
        $query->set( 'ignore_sticky_posts', true );
    }
} );

This tells WordPress to ignore sticky post behavior for secondary queries on the front page, which means the widget will return exactly 3 posts based on your Order By setting without prepending the sticky posts.

Please test this on a staging environment first before applying it to your live site, and let us know how it goes!

Best regards,
Dhruv – UAE Support Team