Are your users leaving your site after reading the first post? Increasing pageviews and reducing bounce rate is a big challenge for site owners.

The best way to keep users engaged on your website is by showing them related content. It has proven to be an effective way of getting more pageviews.

It also helps users discover content that they may not be able to find otherwise. Many popular blogs use this strategy to increase the time users spend on their time.

You can easily use this strategy on your own WordPress site. There are many related posts plugins for WordPress that can automate the whole process for you.

However, these plugins use different approaches to find related content. For example, some may display posts in the same category as related posts, while others may use multiple factors to increase relevancy.

In this article, we will show you some of the best related posts plugins for WordPress with their pros and cons.

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 200,000 active installs. It supports both thumbnail and text display of related posts.

Pros:

YARPP uses a built-in algorithm to find related posts. It has a great template system, allows for thumbnails / text display, supports custom post types, and RSS feed display.

Cons:

If you are running a very large site, then YARPP can be very resource intensive. The pro version of the plugin solves this problem by performing heavy-lifting on YARPP’s own servers.

YARPP is not compatible with WPML plugin. If you are going to create a multi-lingual WordPress site, then you should choose Polylang.

Lastly, YARRP is blocked on managed WordPress hosting providers like WP Engine.

2. 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.

3. Related Posts for WordPress

Related Posts for WordPress plugin is a lightweight alternate to more popular related posts plugins. It performs all the resource intensive tasks in the admin area and uses cache to display related posts.

Pros:

Related Posts for WordPress focuses on performance. It is faster and does not slow down your website. It supports thumbnail and textual display of related posts list.

There is a widget and shortcode which you can use anywhere to display related posts.

Cons:

If you had been using other related posts plugins, then you might miss a few extra features.

4. Related Posts by Taxonomy

Taxonomies in WordPress are used to sort content into different terms. Categories and Tags are two default WordPress taxonomies used by most WordPress blogs.

Related Posts by Taxonomies plugin allows you to display posts using the same taxonomy terms. For example, you can select to display posts by ‘Category’ or ‘Tags’.

The plugin will then display related posts filed under the same category or tag as the one currently displayed.

Pros

Easy to use and gives you limited control on what is displayed as related to each item. It event works for custom taxonomies and post types, this allows you to display related items for other content items as well.

You can display related posts in posts, with or without thumbnail, or in a sidebar widget.

Cons

The plugin offers limited options than some other related posts plugins. It only uses taxonomy terms as a metric, which means your results may not be the best related posts.

5. Inline Related Posts

Inline Related Posts is different than other plugins in this list. Instead of showing related posts below content, this plugin shows them inside your articles. This kind of inline display of related content is quite popular on news and blog sites.

Pros:

Displays related posts when users are more engaged in the content and are more likely to click. It has easy setup and allows you to control where you want to display inline related post links in your content.

Cons:

If you want to display related posts at the end of each post, then you will need to install another plugin. Two related posts plugins on one site can be very resource intensive.

Bonus Tips

You may have noticed that we have repeatedly mentioned that related posts plugin can be resource intensive. It is possible that some of these plugins may not work well on a shared WordPress hosting.

In that case, you can use Custom Related Posts plugin. This plugin allows you to manually add related posts to a post. The link relationship work both ways, so if you add an old post as related post to a new one, then the old post will also display the new post as related.

Another option is to manually display related posts with thumbnails without using plugins.

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.

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