What should I use for content recommendations on a homepage?

For homepage content recommendations, the best choice depends on your traffic, data maturity, and how personalized you want the experience to be. Here’s the practical rule of thumb:

Good default options

1. Trending / Popular content

   • Best when you have limited user history.
   • Works well for new visitors and as a fallback.
   • Easy to explain and usually performs reliably.

2. Recently viewed / continue where you left off

   • Great for returning users.
   • High intent, often strong engagement.
   • Simple and very effective if you have session/user history.

3. Personalized recommendations

   • Best for logged-in users with enough behavior data.
   • Typically based on clicks, views, likes, follows, purchases, or reading history.
   • Can significantly improve relevance, but needs more data and tuning.

Strong homepage strategy

A common and effective setup is:

• Top section: personalized or continue-watching/reading
• Second section: trending/popular
• Third section: category-based or topic-based recommendations
• Fallback for new users: popular, editorial picks, or location/language-based content

If you’re just starting

Use:

• Popular/trending
• Editor’s picks
• Category-based modules
• Simple personalization later

If you already have user data

Use:

• Collaborative filtering
• Content-based recommendations
• Hybrid recommendations
• Business rules to avoid low-quality or repetitive results

Best practice

Use a hybrid approach:

• personalized where possible
• popular/trending as fallback
• editorial/business rules for quality control
• diversity so the homepage doesn’t feel repetitive

If you want, I can recommend the best approach based on your site type — for example: news, ecommerce, media streaming, SaaS, or community platform.