What is The Word­Press Loop?

The Loop is PHP code used by Word­Press to dis­play posts. Using The Loop, Word­Press pro­cesses each post to be dis­played on the cur­rent page, and for­mats it accor­ding to how it matches spe­ci­fied cri­teria within The Loop tags. Any HTML or PHP code in the Loop will be pro­cessed on each post.

When Word­Press docu­men­ta­tion says „This tag must be within The Loop“, such as for spe­cific Tem­p­late Tag or plugins, the tag will be repeated for each post. For example, The Loop dis­plays the fol­lo­wing infor­ma­tion by default for each post:

You can dis­play other infor­ma­tion about each post using the appro­priate Tem­p­late Tags or (for advanced users) by acces­sing the variable, which is set with the cur­rent post’s infor­ma­tion while The Loop is running.