Random, Dynamic List Sorting

Sometimes it's nice to be able to feature things randomly on a page... a few random customer testimonials, or some featured products, for example.

Maybe you have a photo gallery, but you want to mix up those tiles regularly to make it more interesting.

Webflow introduced random sorting for Collection Lists in 2016. To use it, just select your Collection List in the designer and set the sorting to-

Random order, shuffle

Best Practices & Limitations

Random + Limit

I use this feature often in sidebar views, where e.g. I want to show 2 testimonials, but I want them to change automatically.

To do use, use _{random order}, with _{limit = 2} on that Collection List. These two work together beautifully.

Then below that list, you can add a link to view all which takes them to the all testimonials page.

How often does it refresh?

Note that the random ordering will update every 12 hours, and generally not on each visit.

If you want sorting to be more frequent, you can do the sorting client-side.

Don't use pagination

Importantly, random and pagination do not work together.

As of 2024-Mar, it appears that when you enable pagination, that the random sorting doesn't actually occur. It may look random, but the 12 hour refresh will not show different results.

There is no indication that random sorting will not apply.

This feature deprecation was likely done to prevent an earlier problem where having both features work in parallel could generate pages that contain duplicates.

Wishlist item - https://wishlist.webflow.com/ideas/WEBFLOW-I-5660

References

https://discourse.webflow.com/t/cms-random-sorting/20206/9?u=waldo

https://webflow.com/feature/random-dynamic-list-sorting#:~:text=Just%20choose%20%22Random%20order%22%20as,CMS%2C%20and%20on%20published%20sites.

https://university.webflow.com/lesson/sort-collection-lists

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