5 Most Popular Related Posts Plugins For WordPress

Presenting related posts on your blog post is a good idea to increase the page views of your blog. It is also good for lowering the bounce rate of the website. More they will stay on your website, less will be the bounce rate of your website. Increased page views and low bounce rate improve the SEO score of a website. Moreover, displaying related posts is also beneficial for your readers. They will find more of your useful content on your website without leaving your website.

We will introduce you 5 related posts plugins, which are very popular for their purpose. Following plugins are heavily used by the WordPress websites for displaying the related posts.

1. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin is the most popular related posts plugin. This plugin allows to display related posts on pages, Media and even in feeds. It supports thumbnail as well as text display of related posts. It also gives you the option to decide whether you want to display related posts at the bottom of the current post, or in the sidebar.

This plugin considers categories and tags for determining the related posts. It also gives the option to decide the order of related posts. Posts can be arranged according to score of relevance, date and alphabetical order of titles.

To see the settings page of this plugin, navigate to Settings → YARPP on your WordPress dashboard. On that page, you can choose preferred options to configure this plugin. Otherwise, this plugin enable its meta box beneath the WordPress post editor after activation. So, you can also land on settings page from there.

Active Installs: 300,000+

2. WordPress Related Posts

WordPress Related Posts plugin automatically gets your related posts. But, you can also add them manually. It automatically displays related posts in the bottom of the blog post. It offers you very interesting themes for showing related posts, including pinterest inspired layout. If you wish to show the related posts in pinterest style, this plugin is good for you. It doesn’t support to display related posts on pages, but supports to display them in feeds.

Active Installs: 100,000+

3. Contextual Related Posts

The Contextual Related Posts plugin allows to add related posts to the blog posts, pages (including home page), feeds and archives. It determines related posts using title as well as content. It gives the option to figure which post types you want to include in related posts. You can include posts, pages and attachments in search results.

There is also an option to define the IDs of the post/page to exclude from the results. And, even you can decide on which pages or posts you don’t want to display related posts. The related posts can be displayed in thumbnails as well as in text. The plugin can display thumbnails inline with posts.

You can choose whether inline thumbnail should be after the title of the post, or it should be before the title. For thumbnails, you can even define custom height and width. If you don’t want to display thumbnails, you can choose to display text only. You can use widget to add related posts to any widget area of your theme. And, to display related posts anywhere in the post content, you can use shortcode.

Active Installs: 60,000+

4. Related Posts For WordPress

This plugin is very simple to configure. After activating this plugin, it gives you the option to link all your posts with one click. More options lie inside the “Related Posts” menu. You can see this menu by navigating to Settings → Related Posts from your dashboard. You can display related post using widget or shortcode. Though the plugin automatically creates related posts, you can still add, edit and remove related posts. This plugin doesn’t offer overwhelming amount of options to configure this plugin, yet, the overwhelming feature of this plugin is its performance. It keeps the website fast by creating its own cache.

Active Installs: 4,000+

5. Related Posts Widget with Thumbnails

If you want CSS3 effects for displaying the related posts, this plugin is a very nice solution. It will let you show the related posts only in the widget area of your theme. It is too simple yet too powerful to display related posts in the widget area of the website. It gives CSS3 options to interestingly display the related posts with thumbnails on the website. It gives two layouts for thumbnail display that is Thumbs Left and Thumbs Right.

You can set custom height and width of thumbnails. You can set the limit of number of posts to display in the widget. Besides thumbnail images, you can also show the excerpt with custom limit of words. This plugin offers very interesting CSS3 effects for related posts. So, this plugin offers CSS3 shadow and radius effects.

Also, you can set image direction. You can choose to show right, left and center place of thumbnail (image). Similarly. You can choose the direction of text. All in all, this plugin has fewer options to give you. But, whatever options this plugin gives are worth. If you are have not much requirements of settings, then you may go for Related Posts Widget (with Thumbnails) plugin.

Active Installs: 1000+