How To Add Related Posts To WordPress

There are many related posts plugins for WordPress. These are plugins that automatically add a list of other posts that you’ve written to the end of a single post page, before the comment box.

My old favorite used to be Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) which outputted a list of highly related posts under each post. I then moved onto LinkWithin that added thumbnail images of the posts but it had very few options.

I was recently emailed about nRelate who have a new related posts WordPress plugin. Initially I wasn’t that interested, as how different could it be? But I was wrong, it’s a cracker of a free plugin.

You can see how it looks at the bottom of this post where it says

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It’s easy to set up:

1. Go to Plugins > Add new and search for nrelate. Install and active the nRelate Related Content plugin.
2. Once active you will have a new menu on the left of your dashboard called nRelate with two sub-menus, Dashboard and Related Content.
3. Under Dashboard you can see how the indexing is going (it takes about two hours to get your posts and thumbnails) and also any categories you wish to exclude from being indexed.
4. Under Related Content there are two tabs, General and Thumbnails Gallery.
5. General allows you to choose all your options, pages they get displayed on, the image size, number of related posts etc.
6. Thumbnails Gallery allows you to choose the style of the related posts, or make your own if you know how (see image below).

That’s it. All the hard work is done on their servers so it won’t slow your site down, though means it takes a brief moment to appear on your site.

It has a completely optional advertising network if you want to make any money. I don’t use it so I don’t know how good it is, but it’s there if you want it.

Some other benefits of the plugin are

– Analytics reporting is included, so you’ll see which pages your readers are interested in most on your site, as well as the pageviews generated from the internal linking via the plugin.

– Using the WordPress Links/Blogroll feature you can actually choose to not only share related posts from within your website, but you can also include to share related posts from other websites. This is great for cross promoting with other sites you might own or any blogger friends where you could do a reciprocal exchange if you both use the plugin.

– No re-directs. Unlike some other plugins (like LinkWithin) when a link is clicked nRelate does not redirect your traffic through anyone’s site but your own. You get all the internal traffic ‘link juice’ with no middleman getting in your way.

So far I really like it. It provides relevant results, allows me to choose a default image for posts without an image, a variety of designs, and works in the background without slowing my site down.

Plus it’s free – get it here.