Are your users leaving your site after reading the first post? Increasing pageviews and reducing bounce rate is a big challenge for new bloggers and content publishers. In this article, we will talk about how to display related posts in WordPress, so when a user is done reading your first article, they are encouraged to look through other articles as well. To display related posts below your articles, we will highlight 5 best related posts plugins for WordPress.
1. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin aka YARPP is one of the most popular WordPress related posts plugin with more than 2.4 Million downloads. It supports both thumbnail and textual display of related posts.
Pros: YARPP uses a built-in algorithm to find related posts. It has a great templating system, allows for thumbnails and text display, and it supports custom post types and RSS feed display.
Cons: If you are running a very large site, then YARPP can be very resource intensive. In those cases, you’re recommended to use YARPP Experiments to manually control cache, throttle status, and so on.
2. nRelate Related Content
nRelate is a third-party related content provider with a WordPress plugin for publishers. They also offer advertising opportunity to publishers who want to display advertisements along with their related posts.
Pros: You are not required to create an account on nRelate website to use this plugin. It comes with highly configurable settings page which allows you to control the look and feel of your related posts. It is not resource intensive because it utilizes the nRelate servers. It also doesn’t force you to display nRelate branding which is highly desirable by many.
Cons: The default plugin settings are not very SEO friendly unless you check the box at the bottom of the settings page which allows you to use the beta script for displaying related posts. nRelate takes some time to process all your posts before starting to display related posts.
3. Contextual Related Posts
Contextual Related Posts is another WordPress plugin to display related posts. It tries to improve relevancy by contextually matching posts. It can display related posts as thumbnails and text.
Pros: For text only related posts, it works out of the box and has a simpler settings page. It tries to use images inside a post as thumbnail when no featured image or post thumbnail is found.
Cons: The plugin does not come with any template to display thumbnails. Instead it just displays thumbnail images in a bulleted list. Users can add their own CSS to style it, but beginner level users may find it difficult. Just like YARPP, this plugin also does not scale well on larger sites. Managed WordPress Hosts like WPEngine has blocked this plugin to be used by their customers because on larger sites it will slow down your site.
4. MicroKid Related Posts
MicroKids Related Posts plugin allows you to manually enter related posts when writing a post. Its the perfect option for users who want to have a greater control on their content. Instead of relying on algorithms, or categories/tags to find relevant posts, why not just add them yourself when writing a new post.
Pros: By manually adding related content you bring relevancy to the content that matches your needs. The plugin also establishes reciprocal relationships between posts, so if you add Post A to Post B, then Post B will also show Post A as related.
Cons: It requires you to take additional time to add related posts because you have to do it manually.
5. Outbrain
Outbrain is a third party service offering to increase user engagement by displaying contextually relevant links. They have a WordPress plugin which can be used to connect your site to Outbrain. Once you have signed up for the service, you need to configure Outbrain to only display related posts from your own website. It supports both list and thumbnail views.
Pros: Related posts load faster than other third party services. It also shows you the click through reports on Outbrain account dashboard, so you can see which posts are performing better.
Cons: You will need to create an account and add your blog to obtain an authorization key for the plugin. Most settings are configured on Outbrain website. Lastly, it also displays a link to Outbrain website on the related posts widget.
We hope that this article helped you find the best related posts plugin for your WordPress website. Check out this guide for more tips on how to increase pageviews and reduce bounce rate in WordPress. For feedback and questions please leave a comment below.
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