When you are looking to reduce your bounce rate, you might be interested in how to show related posts on your WordPress website. Not only does it increase the pages per session and page views, it also makes it easier to find the content your visitors might be interested in as well. This is the best way to keep users engaged and convert them from visitors to true fans.
The easiest way to get related posts on your WordPress is by using one of your 6 recommended WordPress Related Posts Plugins below, so read along to find your perfect match!
Or read our article about the best WordPress Popular Posts Plugins 😉
1 Inline Related Posts
This is my favorite WordPress plugin, which I use on all my sites. It estimates related posts to display by categories, tags or both of them, but displays them inside your articles. So instead of placing a single box below your post with may related articles, it places many related articles one after another inside your content. This increased my pages per sessions a lot and therefore decreased my bounce rate, just by activating the plugin!
The advantage of this Related Post Plugin is, that it offers your readers a recommendation of blog posts while they are still reading. Therefore, and because of the amazing layout of the boxes, you’ll have the full attention of the people reading through your articles.
It comes with predefined templates and a completely free version. But to be able to use the templates with featured images, you’ll need to grab the premium version, which costs $27 per year. There is also an option to insert related posts at the end of your article, if you want to.
2 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)
The first WordPress plugin I ever had is YARPP, which worked very well for my sites. With over 100.000 installations it is very popular, well known and works right out of the box. It uses its own built-in algorithm to find related posts, even for custom post types.
It allows you to display posts with thumbnails and text, comes with a great template system and supports RSS Feed display. But be aware that this plugin is performance hungry, especially on large sites. I guess they know about that, because it even has a pro version, where the heavy–lifting is performed on YARPP’s own servers.
Buy the way, if you need to import or export WordPress posts, be sure to check out our guide 😉
3 Google AdSense (Matched Content)
Yep, I am not joking and of course this is not a plugin or specific to WordPress. You can just enable an advertising format called ‘Matched Content’ in your AdSense account, if your site is eligible for this feature.
This feature act’s like so-called Native Ads. It will display content recommendations from your site (if you enable this in the settings) and from advertisers. When a user clicks on other content, you’ll earn your AdSense fee. When visitors click on your own articles, you won’t earn something, but they will stay on your site.
The best thing about this is, that is uses an algorithm by Google to predict which articles the user might be interested in (Advertised and your own articles). I guess, no other solution can provide this kind of in depth-knowledge about the visitor and perfect suggestions.
And keep in mind that this doesn’t affect you performance like plugins, because all the heavy lifting is done by Google 😉
4 Contextual Related Posts
This is a quiet good alternative to YARPP. It tries to increase the relevancy by contextually matching posts to display, either as thumbnail or text.
But be aware, even though it works well when displaying as text or thumbnail, it doesn’t come with any presets or templates for the thumbnail view. It just displays the thumbnails inside a bulleted list. While this might be good enough for you and cloud be styled with CSS by yourself, CSS Styling is nothing to recommend a beginner.
Also keep in mind that related post plugins are performance hungry. This plugin in example is blocked by some Managed WordPress Hosts like WPEngine, because it doesn’t scale well on larger sites. This is also true for YARPP.
5 Jetpack
The flagship All in One WordPress Plugin Jetpack by Automaticc, offers many Features. performance Tools, Monetization, analytics and writing tools are just a few to mention.
A related Posts Tool is also included, which can be found under the traffic section of Jetpack Settings and enabled by a click on the Activate button. Don’t get me wrong, the posts look great, but I miss some customization options. You can choose
6 Related Posts for WordPress
Related Posts for WordPress is similar to Contextual Related Posts form above, but performs all resource intensive tasks in the admin area and displays only cached related posts to the user. So, this WordPress Plugin could be considered more lightweight and performance focused… Just like our guide on how to preload Key Requests in WordPress 😉
They also have a pro version which comes with full control about the styling, over-writable templates, custom taxonomy support and more features.
Which one is your favorite one or is installed on your WordPress Blog? We would love to know, so let us know in the Comments!