5 Related Post Plugins For WordPress You Should Try

5 Related Post Plugins For WordPress You Should Try

The success of your website as well as the loyalty to your brand depends on how much of your website content is consumed by your audience. The quality of your content is essential, but it is also very important that your visitors can easily navigate your website. If you are asking yourself how to get your visitors to read more of your content, you should be thinking about related post links implemented into your pages. Luckily, WordPress enthusiasts have done your thinking for you, so here are some of the best related post plugins from their camp that you should try.

Yuzo Related Posts

Yuzo Related Posts is a great plugin for making your visitors stay on your site a little longer, without slowing down other aspects while doing so. Not only that, it offers a lot of functions that you can make use of. Next to being super-fast, it’s very flexible when it comes to which related posts you want to show to your visitors. Furthermore, it has a neat minimalist design with some cool effects, a visit counter, and the ability to customize text, background color, thumbnails, and list your posts vertically or horizontally.

While on one hand it’s very easy to setup, and even easier to use, it does have the issue of not being as lightweight as you would expect from such a fast plugin.

Jetpack

Jetpack is a very feature-rich plugin with a great related post module. If you have more than 10 posts on your blog, it can analyze your content, as well as categories and tags, in order to choose the most relevant posts it should link to. It comes with a lot of customization options – you can place your related posts on top of the article instead of the bottom, and set the number of posts that you want to be shown. You are also able to exclude posts and entire categories from appearing.

The great thing about Jetpack is that it’s very serious about its security and its advanced functions make it truly stand out. On the other hand, it tends to be kind of slow, but you can bypass this by turning off modules you are not using.

Contextual Related Posts

Contextual Related Posts is a powerful plugin with a lot of features. It enables you to place your related post links at points in your article of your choosing, with the use of a shortcode, or in a sidebar widget. Next to the thumbnail image, it allows you to implement an excerpt from your article below, by setting the number of characters you want to be seen. Thanks to the custom CSS you can customize your related posts the way you like.

The great thing about this plugin is that it comes with neat customization features and enables you to select the number of posts you want to appear, as well as to exclude irrelevant posts. The downside is that it’s very database-intensive and is blacklisted by some WP hosting services.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin, does more than its name suggests – it gives you a lot of flexibility with custom post types and pages as well. YARPP enables you to link to posts that are relevant in the sidebar as well as the bottom of the page. It comes with a sophisticated algorithm that takes title, content, categories and tags into account. If you want more advanced features and functionality, you can get the premium version of the plugin.

While it’s very popular and  comes with a lot of features, it suffers from the same problem as Contextual Related Posts – it’s very resource-intensive, and therefore it’s blacklisted by WordPress hosting services such as WP Engine and Media Temple.

WordPress Related Posts

In contrast to most of the other related posts plugins, WordPress Related Posts is quite lightweight. The great thing about it is that it comes with built-in caching. The related posts feature is implemented into your footer, and you are able to choose which older posts you want to display, or even from posts that are part of the network of other users of this plugin. It supports restyling of your posts, thumbnails and a variety of customization options.

While it’s sure not to slow down your website, it lacks some of the functions of other plugins, so if you’re looking for an extensive plugin, it may not be what you’re looking for.

Final words

Installing a good related post plugin is important for you boost your overall SEO performance – your bounce rate, time on website, and page views. It’s also a great way to revive some of your older posts that have been pushed off the front page. All five of these plugins have their advantages and disadvantages, so it is up to you to choose which one will suit your needs best.