Are your users leaving your site after reading the first post? Increasing pageviews and reducing bounce rate is a big challenge for new bloggers and content publishers. Related Posts Plugins are an amazing way to keep a visitor on your site. Today we will review four Related Posts Plugins. There are quite a lot of Related Posts plugins available in the official WordPress.org plugin-directory. So finding the best plugin for your own site can be a challenge.
What are Related Posts?
Related Posts are an easy way to add outbound links to related content from around the web to make life easier for your readers and to attract attention from other authors.
The first one is Efficient Related Posts by Aaron D. Campbell. A related posts plugin that works quickly even with thousands of posts and tags. Can be added automatically to the end of posts.
The second one is WordPress Related Posts by Zemanta Inc. WordPress Related Posts generates a list of related posts with thumbnails and gives you click-through statistics.
The third one is Related Posts also by Zemanta Inc. It will put the link to related content to help your readers. You will get attention from other authors and make great outbound links for SEO with just a few clicks.
And the fourth one is Related Posts Plugin by BestWebSoft. This plugin allows you to display related posts with similar words in category, tags, title or by adding special meta key for posts.
I did a little digging on each of these items. My criteria were: the easiest plugin to install that would ideally give me lots of options. I reviewed the main features of these plugins. Each plugin has a number of advantages and disadvantages.
1. Efficient Related Posts
Let’s consider advantages of this plugin:
– you can change the title ‘related posts’ in our own title.
– also you can choose where where to display the related posts
Disadvantages
– There are limitations.
– there is no screenshots of the product
– it is not very easy to install
– posts are based only by tags.
– there is no way to show related post by category
This plugin has a lot of disadvantages. The description of plugin is unclear. There is a lot of unnecessary information. As for limitations: for example, developers made only a certain number of posts to store (10 by default, but you can set it to whatever you want). This means that if you decide you need to display more than 10, you need to have the plugin re-process all posts.
2. WordPress Related Posts
Advantages:
– easy to install
– works fine
– It looks very good!
– different thumbnails styles
– real time traffic analytics panel to rate and follow the readers’ engagement
– a quick and efficient support
Disadvantages:
– thumbnail images are displayed instead of your own
WordPress related posts is one of the most unusual plugins in this category. It shows related posts beautifully and works well when еру website is viewed on mobile. The uniqueness of this plugin is that it also provides click-through statistics and pageviews generated from this plugin. It supports different styles, thumbnails and is fully customizable.
And now as for disadvantages. This plugin doesn’t really work good because weird thumbnail images are displayed instead of your own, no matter WHAT you do to try and fix it. And also the problem is…THAT plugin forces you to join a service and display posts from external website. Despite everything it has the potential to be a nice plugin.
3. Related Posts
Advantages:
– easy to install
– easy to customize and implement the PHP tags by yourself in your own theme.
– great support
Disadvantages:
– there are a lot of insignificant defects
– it is a copy of another plugin.
What’s the difference between this plugin and WordPress Related Posts of the same author? They’re basically the same; the developers adopted the principle of having three “release channels”. This one has the most experimental (but still stable!) features, WordPress Related Posts is a bit more advanced. This plugin places a list of links with thumbnails at the bottom of your posts. It increases pageviews and engages readers to stay on your site longer and discover more of your content. It also recommends related posts from across the web and in turn promotes your posts to other users. In this way you get new unique visitors to your site and improve SEO.
4. Related Posts Plugin by BestWebSoft
Let’s consider advantages of this plugin:
– It displays related posts by category, meta key, tags or title.
– You can choose the number of posts to show in the input with label: “How many posts to display:”.
– unbelievable support team
– easy to install and use.
Disadvantages:
– currently only two translations are available
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Related Posts Plugin by BestWebSoft allows you to display related posts with similar words in category, tags, title or by adding special meta key to posts, and display list of the titles of these posts by the widget or by the shortcode. This plugin works amazing without any problems and has rating 5 in WordPress.
So after reviewing all the plugins we can make a conclusion that the most effective plugin for your website is Related Posts Plugin by BestWebSoft.
This plugin has a lot of advantages. For example it displays related posts by category, tags or title, not only by tags as Efficient Related Posts plugin does. There are no limits on the number of posts to show on related posts. As for WordPress Related Posts, it has a lot of problems with thumbnails. After updating the plugin thumbnails are displayed incorrectly. Related Posts is really the same as WordPress Related Posts. The difference between these plugins is minimal.
