Writing great content for your website is one way to increase and retain your existing traffic. Getting your visitors to stay on your website for a longer period of time is a good idea too. One way to do that is by adding related posts under each and every article you publish on your website. Contextual related posts are the most effective ones but they can slow your website down. WordPress Related Posts is one of few plugins that performed fairy well on our website.
WordPress Related Posts uses WordPress tags to grab similar posts on your site. If it can’t find related posts on your website, it can show popular or random posts. You do have the option to exclude categories and disable excerpt and comment counts for each post. This plugin is quite fast and does not add too much load on your server.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin is one of the most popular related posts around. It uses an advanced algorithm that takes into account post titles, content, tags, and categories to find the most relevant posts to your articles. It uses a cache system to make sure content is delivered in a speedy fashion on your site. This plugin can automatically add the appropriate code to your website, saving you some time in the process.
If you have a large website and do not want your server to suffer from performance issues, Efficient Related Posts is a good bet. It finds related posts in your admin area, reducing the number of times that resource-consuming queries run. If you still want to use YARPP on your site, you can tame it by using the below tips:
- turning off “cross relate posts and pages”;
- turning on “show only previous posts”;
- not considering tags and/or categories in the Relatedness formula;
- not excluding any tags and/or categories in The Pool.
Adding one of the above related posts plugin should help you keep your audience on your website for a longer period of time and make your posts more useful.