Displaying a fixed number of posts in WordPress without Pagination

Scenario: Settings > Reading set to show 10 (or whatever number, doesn’t matter) latest blog posts (WordPress default).

And you want to display just 3 Posts without links to next sets of paginated pages.

So let’s just add this in functions.php:

Simple, right?

Apparently, that is not sufficient. When you reload your Posts page (the front page or the homepage, in this case) you’ll find that while only 3 Posts are displayed, pagination will continue to appear.

By setting no_found_rows to true, we can truly retrieve a fixed number of posts thus getting rid of the pagination.

References:

http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/a/181553/14380

http://www.billerickson.net/code/improve-performance-of-wp_query/