| Plugin | Key Features | Pricing | Direct Link |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shareaholic | ✓ Easily add related posts on your site ✓ Customize with the content dashboard ✓ Add or remove any post, tag, or category ✓ Optimized for mobile devices | Free | Download |
| YARPP | ✓ Advanced customizable algorithm ✓ Inbuilt cache makes it super fast ✓ Pre-built list and thumbnail template ✓ Flexible placement options | Free | Download |
One of the simplest ways you can decrease the bounce rate of your blog is by helping your readers take action after reading the post. In simple words, make your readers stick to your blog by giving them the option of what to read next. Think of related posts as the next course of action for your readers. When a reader is done reading your article, he needs something more to read and it works best when it’s related to your topic only.
One of the easiest ways to achieve this is by adding a related post widget after your blog posts. There are many options available in WordPress plugin repo, and I have listed down the best ones from my experience. You can use any one of these and you can notice a considerable amount of decrease in your blog bounce rate.
Moreover, most of these plugins have options to configure how your related posts should be shown. You can show them with or without thumbnails, and can also pick the related posts option from different design options.
Best Related Posts WordPress Plugins with thumbnail
There are third-party services that do this job pretty well and without the requirement of coding knowledge, but it give very little or negligible SEO value, as all your related posts are not directly linked. Here are a few plugins, that you can use to show related posts with thumbnails after your blog posts and are SEO friendly too. These related posts improve your internal linking and improve your ranking.
Update: I’m updating this post with new plugin suggestions. For now, here are new direct links for suggested related post plugins. Will update the details about them in coming days. Apologies for the delay!
1. Shareaholic plugin
Shareaholic was initially a social media sharing button plugin and recently they have revamped the plugin to add a related post feature. Surprisingly their algorithm is quite accurate in suggesting related post which is relevant to the post itself. I have tested this plugin on ShoutMeLoud and it looks pretty awesome.
To enable the feature, you need to download the free plugin from WordPress repo over here, go to Shareasholic plugin settings, and enable the feature.
You can show related posts with thumbnails below posts, pages, categories, and index pages. Every option can be configured manually and you can also customise the look of related posts to match your blog design. You can also exclude certain posts, and pages to be shown from related posts. The exclusion feature also supports wildcard, so you can quickly remove any existing category or tag posts to be shown from related posts.
You can also use the Shareaholic plugin to add social sharing button below posts or floating buttons. Moreover, this is a good plugin when you need both the features of social sharing and related posts.
2. YARPP
YARPP a.k.a Yet another related post plugin uses many factors to show related posts and this is a plug and play WordPress plugin.
YARPP can be also configured to show related posts in the feed which is very useful for getting extra clicks from your feed readers.
Especially for a huge blog, this is one of the best related post plugins for WordPress as it uses the caching mechanism. This means plugins will not keep generating related posts on the fly, instead once related post is generated for a post, it will show it from the cache, which stops this plugin from increasing php calls.
Once you are done installing the YARPP plugin, you can access its settings panel under Settings > Related Posts(YARPP)
You can automatically enable to show related posts or you can use custom code to show related posts at specific place. YARPP can also be configured to show related posts with thumbnails by using a custom template.
You can scroll down further on the settings page, you can configure various options for showing related posts in the feed. I will highly suggest keeping the description off as it makes related post looks like little busy.
In case, if you maintain one such category or tag which you don’t want your readers to see again in related posts, you can exclude such categories or tags. I would suggest you create a specific tags for outdated content and exclude it using this plugin.
This way, your readers will see only updated and useful content. You can also exclude pages to show as your related posts. One more reason that this is one of the best related post plugins is because, in the last 1 and a half years, this plugin has gone through lots of iterations and is constantly updated and compatible with the latest WordPress version.
Showing related posts below blog posts is one of the easiest ways to decrease the bounce rate of your blog and if you are running a WordPress blog, YARPP is one of the easiest ways to add related posts to your WordPress blog.
Now, many premium WordPress themes come with the in-built feature of showing related posts along with a thumbnail, but when you are using free themes, such plugins are a life saver. Optionally, if you are good with PHP and CSS, you can look for some resources and tutorials on the Internet to code it yourself.
I’m stilling looking for one such related posts which work with custom post types and can be configured to show related posts from specific custom post type only. If you know of such a plugin, let me know via comments. If you enjoyed reading this resource, do share it with other WordPress bloggers.
Also, read:
- 6 Best WordPress A/B Testing Plugins To Split Test Your Site
- 6 Best WordPress Translation Plugins For A Multilingual Website
- 7 Best WordPress Image Compression Plugins Compared
In my theme there is Related Posts present. I dont need any plugin but if someone does not have it I will recommend ShareaHolic its attractive and easy to customize. Related Posts plugins help you to get more pageviews and reduce bounce rate.
Good stuff, Harsh.
I was using nRelate and i can personally say it worked wonderfully. Sadly i had to disable it, but only because the website in question already had too many plugins installed, making its performance a bit sluggish.
Enjoy your day.
Elvis
Hi Harsh,
Great share about WordPress plugin. I prefer nrleate plugin. Whats the right speed time we should have on our blog?
Is there is any plugin to show post from other wordpress blog on same server. I mean show post from blog1 on blog2.
I like nRelate. They provide many options you can choose which type of look you want. Also I like their feature in which a related post slide come out when we scroll down the page.
Hey Harsh, i wanted to ask if i should allow content ads on my nRelate widget ? I know it helps you earn, but doesn’t it decrease bounce rate ?
Hi Harsh,
I am using the nrelate flyout plugin and I have a good bounce rate but I would really like to understand how the plugin helps with internal linking.
I only recently started learning to build websites and this blog is helping me immensely, so, thank you very much for having this most helpful website.
Thanks for the great piece of code! Via the WordPress forum, I found some extra code to adapt it for showing multiple tags. However, I’m running into a problem I cannot fix: I’m using posts with several tags. The effect is that some posts are turning up twice in the results. I’ve checked the loop page on WordPress, but cannot get the code right. Do you have any idea on how I can fix this? You can see the code I’m using here:
Hey harsh, i agree with you, this is a heavy plugin so i think to reduce load time i would probably use YARRP. What say?
— Rakesh
Seoux I was using it, but due to server load I have to remove it, since pulling lots of thumbnails, create lots of php calls. I will be moving to more powerful dedicated server and than I will use it.
Did it working with external image, like from other server 🙂
As always I find something else to help me out at Shout Me Out Loud, just installed Thesis and wasn’t happy with how YARPP was displaying along with my Twitter and Facebook share buttons.
This looks much better, now I just need to figure out how to color it and I will be set. Thank you and RT
Dinesh it is and it has extra edge over SEO . Since Likwithin only helps in reducing bounce rate but no extra edge for SEO.
Thumbnail in related posts is an awesome feature and it can reduce the page bounce rate.
But I am struggling to get it done correctly on my blog.
I guess if you want the thumbnail then it’s ok, I doubt if this really makes any difference to the user having thumbnails. It’s just my opinion thogh 🙂
George Thumbnail make it interesting and increase the CTR. Remember images speaks 100 words, same thing is here… I have seen the difference in my no. of page views after using this plugin.
Sourish I think that’s fair. If you are using link with in plugin, they also put the same link. I guess plugin author deserver a link back.. How does it make a difference? Specially when you getting better feature then link with in plugin and just one backlink like link with in?
Thats the real benefit of this plugin. I didn’t noticed that.
Anyway one more thing they also put their small link too after related posts… thats really irritating!
Shahab I had a word with Sandip , the author of the plugin and he confirmed me that inn upcoming update, they will give an option to remove credit..
I will have a look at the plugin, what’s the difference between this and YARP?
George
The basic difference is thumbnails..which make them more attractive..
I tried this plugin on my blog…but its not showing up the thumbnails. Don’t know why?
Anyway i’ll try it once more
Shahab check with the settings and also permission of cache folder..
yes i’ve set wp-thumbie permission to 777 but i am still getting problems!
I think the problem may be due to css!
Nice Thumbnail Related Posts Plugin but i want to ask that can these posts in vertical or in columns.Thanks ..
As of now we have vertical and row format listing (when you want your own styling) and soon horizontal style listing will be added in next plugin update. So you will have complete freedom with styling part as well as full customization to suite your need.