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Adding related posts to your blog can help improve content engagement, keep visitors on your site, and boost your SEO. By introducing your readers to other relevant content on your site, you provide an impressive user experience, which will ultimately help your site achieve its goals. The only question left is how to add related posts to your WordPress blog?

In this article, we discuss in detail the benefits of using a related posts plugin.

Why Should I Use a Related Posts Plugin?

Keep Visitors on Your Site

When a new visitor arrives at your site, they will not know what to do or where to look. It is your job to make your audience’s journey on your site as seamless and easy as possible. If your visitors have to think about where they should go next, your website needs to improve its navigation.

Many of your site’s visitors will find your site through a search engine, arriving on a specific post or page that was related to their initial search. The problem here is that once people have finished reading the article that drew them to your site in the first place unless told differently, they will immediately leave. This is where a related posts plugin can be so useful.

Create a Loyal Following

Creating a loyal following should be a focus for all WordPress websites. A related posts plugin will help your visitors easily access a range of articles, giving your content viewing time it probably wouldn’t have received otherwise. The more your audience reads, the more likely they are to become fans of your writing and website content, increasing the likeliness that they will follow you and share your articles on social media, and regularly return to your site.

Improve Your SEO

A related posts plugin is an effective way to improve your WordPress website’s SEO. By encouraging your visitors to read more and more blog posts, the number of page views and time spent on-site increases. At the same time, the bounce rates will decrease. These metrics are all viewed positively by the search engines and will help your content rank well.

Re-use Old Content

Having to constantly churn out new content that is quickly buried pages deep can become frustrating. Using a related posts plugin is a great way to get your older, but still, high-quality content, viewed by your audience.

How to Add Related Posts to WordPress Using A Plugin

JetPack

Jetpack is a feature-rich solution that can add impressive functionality to your WordPress website. Created by Automattic, Jetpack is made up of a wide assortment of modules, all committed to improving the performance of your site. However, for this article, we will be focusing on the module ‘Related Posts’.

‘Related Posts’ will enable you to add an attractive related posts section (as seen above) underneath each article on your site. This tool will analyze each post and then display other contextualized articles to your visitors, that they may be interested in reading.

Jetpack provides some quick customization options, but you can also further configure your related posts section using code. Related posts are generated based on their content, as well as any designated tags or categories. Jetpack also undertakes all the processing and serving from their cloud. This means there is no additional load on your website’s server, ensuring your site’s speed isn’t affected.

Jetpack is extremely easy to install and set up, and ‘Related Posts’ can be activated simply by a click of a button.

Yet Another Related Post Plugin (YARPP)

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) is a popular option for those looking how to add related posts on their WordPress website. YARPP provides some impressive features and will give you more control over the look and position of your related post section than Jetpack.

YARPP lets you select whether you want to display posts, pages and/or custom post types, using thumbnails or a list view. You can also add a related posts section under each blog post, in a sidebar, or in an RSS feed. YARPP uses its advanced algorithm, that considers content, post titles, tags, categories and custom taxonomies, to display relevant content to your readers.

The downside to using YARPP on your website is that it can be extremely database intensive. For this reason, it has been banned by a number of WordPress hosting services, including WPEngine.