Increasing page views and reducing the bounce rate is a big challenge for site owners. By viewing relevant posts we will provide here the best extensions for relevant posts, you can keep people on your site and boost engagement.
In this article, we will show you some of the best plugins for WordPress related posts with their pros and cons.
Why do related posts appear on your WordPress site ?
The best way to keep users engaged on your website is to show them relevant content. It has proven to be an effective way to get more page views.
It also helps users discover content that they might not be able to find otherwise. Many popular blogs use this strategy to increase the time that users spend on their time.
Viewing related posts also gives you an opportunity for internal link content. This makes it easier for your visitors to find less popular articles and improve the SEO result on your WordPress site .
Now, there are many plugins for WordPress related posts that can automate the whole process for you.
However, these plugins use different ways to find relevant content. For example, some may display posts in the same category as related posts, while others may use multiple factors to increase relevance.
Let’s take a look at some of the best plugins for WordPress related posts.
1. MonsterInsights :
MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress and is used by more than 3 million people. It also allows you to set up Google Analytics on your WordPress site without editing the code or hiring a developer.
With MonsterInsights, you can easily view relevant posts in your content using the Popular Post feature. You can choose from different themes and customize the color of the title of the relevant publication, font, size and more.
MonsterInsights allows you to sort your relevant posts based on comments and social posts. You can also manually add the posts you want to view in the relevant posting area or automatically view the top 5 posts from Google Analytics.
The advantages :
MonsterInsights offers various themes and customization options for displaying related posts. You can even view popular products if you have an online store . In addition, you can select which posts you want to view automatically.
Negatives :
If you want more powerful and advanced tracking features such as ecommerce tracking, custom dimensions, and form conversion tracking, you will need a MonsterInsights Pro License .
2. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin :
Another plugin for related functions also known as YARPP is one of the most popular WordPress plugins for related post with over 100,000 active installs. It supports the display of both thumbnails and texts of related posts.
The advantages :
YARPP uses a built-in algorithm to find relevant posts. It has a great template system, allows displaying thumbnails text, supports custom post types, and RSS feed display.
Negatives :
If you are running a very large site, YARPP can be very resource-intensive. The Pro version of the extension solves this problem by performing heavy lifting operations on special YARPP servers.
But YARPP is not compatible with the WPML plugin . If you intend to create a multilingual WordPress site, then you should choose Polylang .
Finally, YARPP has been blocked on Managed WordPress hosting providers like WP Engine because it may slow down your site.
3. Contextual Related Posts :
Contextual Related Posts is another WordPress plugin for displaying related posts. It tries to improve relevance by matching posts by context. It can display relevant publications in the form of thumbnails and text.
The advantages :
For text-only related posts, it works out of the box and has a simpler settings page. He tries to use photos inside a post as a thumbnail when he can’t find a featured photo or thumbnail of the post.
Negatives :
The plugin does not come with any template for displaying thumbnails. Instead, it only displays thumbnails in a bulleted list. Users can add their own CSS to their design, but novice users may find it difficult.
Just like YARPP, this plugin does not fit well on larger sites. Managed WordPress hosts like WP Engine have blocked the use of this plugin by their customers because on large sites it will slow down your site.
4. Related Posts by Taxonomy :
Categories in WordPress are used to sort content into different terms. Categories and tags are two default WordPress categories that most WordPress blogs use.
The plugins for posts related to ratings allows you to view posts using the same rating terms . For example, you can limit the display of posts by “category” or “tags”.
The plugin will then display relevant publications filed under the same category or tag as those currently displayed.
The advantages :
Easy to use and gives you limited control over what is displayed as related to each item. The event works with custom labels and post types, allowing you to display relevant items for other content items as well.
You can view related posts in posts, with or without a thumbnail, or in the sidebar widget.
Negatives :
The extension offers limited options than some other post-related extensions. It only uses ranking terms as a metric, which means that your results may not be the best relevant posts.
5. Inline Related Posts :
The relevant publications included are different from the other additions in this list. Instead of showing relevant posts below the content, this extension displays them inside your articles. This type of embedded display of relevant content is very common on news sites and blogs.
The advantages :
It displays relevant posts when users are more engaged in the content and are more likely to click on it. It has an easy setup and allows you to control where you want to display the post links related to it in your content.
Negatives :
If you want to display the relevant posts at the end of each post, you will need to install another extension. Two add-ons linked on one site can be very resource-intensive.
Additional advises
You probably noticed that we have repeatedly mentioned that the extension for related publications can be resource-intensive. It is possible that some of these extensions may not work well on a shared WordPress hosting .
In this case, you can use MonsterInsights to view relevant publications. It is an easy-to-use plugin for beginners and does not affect the performance of your site . In addition, you can easily view relevant publications anywhere on your site.
Another option is to manually view relevant publications using thumbnails without using plugins .
We hope that this article helped you find the best addition of related posts for your WordPress site.