Show 5 latest blog posts, page the rest

There’s a super-simple solution, if you want to apply that to all your archive pages: go to Admin Dashboard > Settings > Reading and set “Blog pages show at most # posts” to 5.

(The less-simple solution is to create a page template that displays only the last five posts instead of the set site default number, then activate that template on a News page you create to display those posts. If you have other categories of posts, you will need that template to also specify only the ‘News’ category. Ask if you need help with this direction.)

I would use both to be honest. The first one for my immediate problem, but I would like more info on the second if oyu’d be so kind.

What theme are you using? Have you seen:

https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Pagination

Sure! Here’s a step-by-step. How you approach depends on how you’re set up, so I will assume that you’re using a .org directory theme (like twentyeleven, etc) rather than a custom-built theme.

1. Create a Child Theme (so that you’re not messing with your current theme’s template files) and activate it.

2. Create a Page Template by copying your current theme’s index.php into your child theme and formatting and renaming it to function as a template.

3. Add a query to the loop in your page template

4. Create a News page and assign your template to it.

5. Add the News page to your menu

This are good techniques to test out anyway — once you get the hang of page templates and queries, you’ll find lots of ways to customize your content feeds. Let us know how it goes!