WordPress custom per page on paged archive vs first page

Derek Ashauer March 23, 2023

I ran into a situation where we wanted to have 10 articles featured on the main Blog page, but then as they paginated through to show 20 per page. The below code uses the “pre_get_posts” filter and some conditionals to make that happen:

add_action( 'pre_get_posts',  'custom_per_page_on_paged'  );
function custom_per_page_on_paged( $query ) {
	if ( $query->is_main_query() && !is_admin() && $query->is_paged() ) {
		$per_page_first = 10;
		$per_page_archives = 20;
		$query->set( 'posts_per_page', $per_page_archives );
		$paged = ( get_query_var( 'paged' ) ) ? get_query_var( 'paged' ) : 1;
		$query->set( 'offset', ( ( $paged - 2 ) * $per_page_archives ) + $per_page_first );
	}
}