How to use order RAND() on WordPress?

You are right that you can’t have WordPress order the retrieved posts randomly. So you’ll have to do that yourself after you have retrieved the array of post objects. Let’s call that $my_posts.

Because you don’t know how many of the posts in that array are featured, you will have to loop through them to split the array. I don’t know how exactly you have defined ‘featured’, but it would look something like this:

$featured_posts = array ();
$nonfeatured_posts = array ();
foreach ($my_posts as $my_post) {
  if (test if featured)
    $featured_posts[] = $my_post
  else
    $nonfeatured_posts[] = $my_post;
// now, let's randomize
shuffle ($featured_posts);
// join the array again
$my_posts = array_merge ($featured_posts,$nonfeatured_posts);
// now you have your array with featured posts randomized

Beware, I couldn’t test this code, but I trust you get the point.

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