Popular Related Posts Plugins Help Increase Page Views

Increasing page views can be accomplished using various methods. One of the easiest ways is to offer related posts after your content.

There’s now over 20,000 free plugins to choose and dozens which have been developed specifically for displaying related posts.

Three of the most popular free plugins for displaying related post titles with and without thumbnail images are:

1. Related Posts Thumbnails
2. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
3. WordPress Related Posts

Lets take a look at the what each offers depending on your needs.

Related Posts Thumbnails

This plugin is one of the best for displaying a thumbnail image and post title link at the end of all your posts content.

• Can be used on both posts and pages
• Choose the number of similar posts to display
• Add a default image in case a post doesn’t have any images
• Pull the thumbnail from posts or a custom field depending on your theme
• Show posts only with thumbnails or which include a feature image

Styling

• Display in a grid or list
• Style all colors and height
• Set text and excerpt length
• Change thumbnail size

Relationship options

You can change the settings so your related posts are displayed according to:

• Categories
• Tags
• Categories and Tags
• Random
• Custom

I tested all these plugins and this was the best for showing thumbnails

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

The most popular plugin for this purpose is YARRP Its will also allow you to display related posts in your rss feeds and integrates with other related plugins.

You can order the results by date, score and title.

This plugin is one of the best if you simply want to display a list of related posts links below after each post content.

Another option is to use this plugin with related posts slider which also integrates with the next plugin, WordPress related posts.

WordPress Related Posts

This plugin allows you to display random and most commented posts if there’s no related posts.

You can also display thumbnails and/or text as well.

Accuracy

I think the most accurate plugins are based on tags as tags are most specific than categories. However, if your titles are highly descriptive of your content then YARRP would work best when setup to order results by title.

The only problem is you’ll need to install another plugin if you want thumbnail images.

Related Thumbnail Quality

If you are using featured images for your author archives, then you can display high quality related posts images.

If you’re setting the plugin to pull an image from your post content. you thumbnails may not look the best sometimes.

Show Related Posts In Different Theme Locations

If your host doesn’t allow you to use related posts plugin, here’s a solution which is hosted on the plugin Developers server therefore doesn’t use any server resources.

The post also includes a range of different methods you can use to show your related posts in different positions in your theme.