If you are not a technical WordPress user, You can use WordPress related posts plugins to display similar content below every blog post or if you know how to code, you can use custom code in your theme, which is not easy for everyone.
In this article, I am going to share some of the most popular and recently updated WordPress Related Posts plugins.
One way of getting search engines to get to your older content a bit easier, thus increasing your WordPress SEO capabilities a LOT, is by using a related posts plugin. These plugins search through your posts database to find posts with the same subject and add links to these posts. Yoast.com/wordpress-seo/#relatedposts
1. Yet Another Related Post Plugin (YARPP)
With 300,000+ active installations, YARPP is one of the most popular plugins for related posts. You can display related posts with thumbnails at the end of blog post.
YARPP can show pages, posts, and custom post types related to the current blog post. It helps you to introduce your readers to other relevant content on your blog.
You don’t need to select related posts manually, this plugin can automatically add Related Posts. The related post can increase internal traffic up to 10%.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin can also display related posts in RSS feeds with custom display options.
Download Plugin : Yet Another Related Post (YARPP)
2. WordPress Related Posts
With 100,000+ active installs is another very popular plugin. WordPress Related Post requires WordPress 3.6 or higher.
To attract readers attention and improve your SEO, WordPress Related Post plugin allows you to link out to Related articles across the web from your compose screen.
If you don’t like automatic related posts feature, You can even search for posts and hand-pick related posts with ease.
Download Plugin: WordPress Related Post
3. Jetpack Related Post
Jetpack from WordPress.com developers is one of the most widely used plugins with 1+ million active installs. Jetpack has over 30+ modules, which allows you to add different features to your WordPress site.
Log in to your WordPress Dashboard, go to JetPack > Settings > Engagement and enable related post module to display similar content at the end ob each blog post.
You can also check/uncheck “Related” header and large and visually striking layout
options, which will display post thumbnail.
Download Plugin: Jetpack
4. Similar Posts
Similar Posts requires WordPress 4.0 or higher. This free plugin can display a list of posts that are similar or related to the current posts.
The similar post list can be customized in many ways. The Similarity of posts is judged according to a current post’s title, content, and tags and you can easily adjust the balance of factors to fit your own website.
You can even display related pages, attachments, and dates. You can even include/exclude posts, authors, categories from the list.
Download Plugin: Similar Posts
5. Contextual Related Posts
This is an update Related posts plugin to display related articles on your blog and feed. It allows you to use thumbnails, shortcodes, widgets and custom post types.
The list of similar posts is based on the content of the post title and/or content of the article, which makes them more relevant and more likely to be of interest to your readers.
The purpose of this plugin is to retain readers/visitors, reduce bounce rates on your site and refresh old content.
You can use [crp] shortcode to display the similar posts anywhere you want in the post content. You can also exclude posts from any category.
Download Plugin: Contextual Related Post
6. Related Posts Thumbnails
This free plugin can display related articles with thumbnails after the blog post. You have full control over thumbnail sizes, display settings, and type of relation.
Thumbnails are displayed in columns under the post with related posts title/excerpt under each post thumbnail.
You can customize and change the colors of the background, border, text, text sizes, background on mouse over, title and excerpt length.
You can set the number of related/similar posts to display, start date, categories to show on and to include, top text, style settings, default image URL.
This plugin is available in Russian, French, Italian, Turkish, German and Indonesian languages.
Download Plugin : Related Posts Thumbnails
7. Yuzo Related Posts
This plugin only works with PHP 5.3+ or higher so make sure to your server supports PHP 5.3+. Yuzo claims to be one of the fastest of all time plugins in WordPress.
This plugin uses caching to make your website load faster. Related articles can be displayed in Horizontal & Vertical styles.
Manually pick related blog posts: You can also select a post that you want to be related to another post.
You can change the thumbnail size and height/width of images. You can read about all features at official plugin page.
Download Plugin : Yuzo Related Posts
8. Related Post by Zemanta
Zemanta’s related blog posts plugin recommends your awesome content to new audiences both on your website/blog and across their network of high-quality sites.
Similar to nRelate, Related Blog Posts by Zemanta can bring new visitors to your site, helping you increase your reach and readership.
Related Blog Posts is a unique plugin which allows you to curate related content for each post, or let Zemanta automatically recommend sources from around the web.
This free plugin comes with a lot of beautiful themes with different thumbnail sizes.
Download Plugin: Related Blog Post by Zemanta
9. Inline Related Post
Inline Related Blog Posts can insert related blog posts inside your post content, which can immediately capture the reader’s attention.
All other plugins, listed in this article display related posts at the end of the blog post but this is the best plugin to display related articles within your blog post content.
You don’t need to use any shortcode to display related articles, this plugin can do it for you. You have full control over the styling of inline related articles.
Some of the biggest websites (Entrepreneur, Wall Street Journal, Business Insider and other) are using this feature to increase internal blog traffic.
ANOTHER IMPORTANT POINT OF VIEW
How many things have you had in the footer post?
- The author box?
- Subscription to your newsletter?
- Maybe you ask users to share the post on social networks?
- You ask them to leave a comment?
- And also… to read related posts?
Inline related blog posts plugin can bring a new experience to your site visitors and help you to win the fight of catching readers attention 😉
Download Plugin: Inline Related Blog Posts
10. Manual Related Posts
This is one of the best plugins to choose related blog posts manually but easily with great ergonomics. You don’t need to display auto/random related blog posts on each site.
Simply click “Add related posts”, search for the best related blog post and click add.
All blog posts are linked to each other, for example, if you add on “blog post A” the “blog post B”, then the “blog post B” will be linked to “blog post A” automatically, even if you can not see it in the backend.
Download Plugin: Manual Related Post
11. Custom Related Posts
This is not a very popular plugin, but BrechtVds has updated this plugin recently. This plugin requires WordPress 3.5 or higher.
Custom Related Blog Posts is a user-friendly plugin for manually selecting and adding related posts to any of your posts, pages or custom post types.
This plugin gives you full control over those related blog post links.
An overview of the features:
- Select post types
- Easily define relations in one or both ways on the post edit page
- Display related content with a shortcode or widget
- Import from XML using post IDs
NOTE: This plugin is under active development. Any feature requests are welcome!
Download Plugin: Custom Related Posts
Final Words
There are so many other free WordPress related posts plugins available. You can find a list of all plugins at WordPress plugin directory.
With 8000+ active installs Microkids related posts plugin is another simple plugin to manually select related posts for your content but this plugin us No longer maintained. It was last updated almost 5 years ago.
Great list. I prefer to use Zemanta. Have tried other related post plugins and never find any better. Zemanta has a good approach in delivering related contents.
Thanks for sharing your favorite plugins. We are using JetPack and InlineRelated Posts.
Hi Tahir,
Looks like some winning plug ins here! Not even sure which one I use LOL. But it’s a good one. Fab way to keep reader’s fannies plugged in to your blog. Some of my readers spend hours going from related post to post, like a spider web on my blog. Good for SEO, great for business. Thanks for sharing!
Ryan
I am using Jetpack and Inline related Post plugins and I really like them.