Are your readers or users leaving your website after reading one post?
This guide is for you. To reduce the bounce rate and increase the pageviews is a hard task for site owners.
If you show a user related content, it will be an effective way to get more pageviews. By using a plugin, you can show related posts on your WordPress site easily.
In this post, I am going to show you the best related posts plugins for WordPress.
5 Best Related Posts Plugins for WordPress
1. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
Yet Another Related Posts plugin is also known as YARPP is the most famous WordPress related posts plugin. It has more than 3.4 million downloads. It supports both text display of related posts and thumbnail.
Pros:
Yet Another Related Posts plugin has a built in algorithm to find related posts from the site. It consists of great template system, text display, allows for thumbnails, supports custom post types and RSS feed display.
Cons:
YARPP can be very resource intensive, if you are running a very large website. The pro or premium version of the plugin can solve the problem by doing heavy-lifting on YARPP’s own servers.
Yet Another Related Post Plugin is not compatible with WPML plugin. If you want to create a multi-lingual or multi language WordPress website, you should select Polylang.
Lastly, YARRP is blocked on Managed WordPress hosting providers such as WPEngine.
2. Contextual Related Posts
Contextual Related posts is another WordPress related post plugin that shows related posts. It drives contextually matching posts to the users. It shows related posts with text and thumbnails.
Pros:
It has a simpler settings page for text related posts and it works out of the box for this. This plugin uses images inside a post as thumbnail when there is not featured image and post thumbnail are present.
Cons:
This plugin does not consist of any template to show thumbnails. It shows thumbnail images in a bulleted list. The beginners cannot add a style to it, but expert users can add their own CSS to style it.
Like YARPP, Contextual related posts plugin cannot work well on larger sites. Managed WordPress Hosts like WPEngine has blocked this plugin for customers. It is because this plugin slow down the sites when they are larger.
3. Related Posts for WordPress
Related Posts for WordPress is another alternative plugin for related posts plugin which is lightweight. This plugin uses cache to show related posts and does all the resource intensive tasks in the admin area.
Pros:
Related Posts for WordPress pays attention to performance. It is fast and will not slow down your site. It also supports textual and thumbnail display of related posts list.
There are a shortcode and widget that you can use to show related posts anywhere on your site.
Cons:
If you had been using other related posts plugin, then you may miss a few extra features.
4. Yuzo Related Posts
Yuzo Related Posts is another related posts plugin which is free. It is full of comprehensive features which you are expecting from a related posts plugin. List views, thumbnail views, horizontal views with thumbnails, built-in-cache etc.
Pros:
It is very easy to setup and use. Users can choose the style by just clicking on it. Caching features makes the performance better from YARPP and Contextual related posts. The widget of this plugin is highly customizable with a number of options.
Cons:
You cannot compromise on speed and you need to know that it is not lightweight.
5. Inline Related Posts
Inline related posts is unique from other plugins in the list. This plugin does not show related posts below the content, it rather shows them inside the post. This type of inline display of related content is famous on blog and news websites.
Pros:
This plugin shows related posts when users are engaged in the content and more likely to click the related post. It is easy to setup and enables you to control the location where you want to show inline related post links in your content or post.
Cons:
If you want to show the related posts at the end of the post, then you need other plugins to do this. To install two related posts plugins on one website can be resource intensive.
Bonus Tips
You may have noticed that I have mentioned several times that related posts plugins can be resource intensive. It is also possible that any of these plugins may not functional on shared WordPress hosting.
In such situation, you need to use Manual Related Posts plugin. By using this plugin, you will be able to add related posts to a post manually. The link relationship will work both ways. If you add an old post as related post to a new post and vice versa.
There is another option to display related posts with thumbnails without using plugins manually.
I hope that this article will help you to find the best related posts plugin for your WordPress site.
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Arsalan Rauf is an entrepreneur, freelancer, creative writer, and also a fountainhead of Green Hat Expert. Additionally, he is also an eminent researcher of Blogging, SEO, Internet Marketing, Social Media, premium accounts, codes, links, tips and tricks, etc.