Sort Category Listings by Featured then Ranking

Hello again, it’s me.

I have several categories on my resource site (like 80+) and would like to be able to have the listings default sort order be FEATURED on top then RATING/RANKING below that (descending by starrating). Because that seems to be the most logical way to feed the listings to the user.

However when I try a few different ways to do this the sorting doesn’t work at all. I tried sorting by ‘starrating’ and then it blocks out all listings that haven’t been rated yet… (so my count goes from 47 listings to 2 because only 2 are rated currently) – one solution to this would be to assign a default rating to all listings but then that would either be too high or too low a rating to start.

Even if I use the default sort options the listings don’t sort as expected. If I sort by popularity (and I have assigned high views to several listings) they don’t show up at the top. But instead sit somewhere in the middle (so it’s not desc or asc sort).

Any way to set this default so it actually works?

Here’s a link to an example category where you can try sorting a few different ways: https://authorstash.com/resources/authorpreneur/