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- The Best WordPress Plugin for Related Posts
The Best WordPress Plugin for Related Posts
[ May 20, 2017 — I have moved from Similar Posts to YARPP because Similar Posts was destroying my box, both from a network requests and CPU standpoint. I’d avoid it if I were you. ]
I’ve been hunting for a solid related posts plugin on WordPress for years.
My go-to has always been Contextual Related Posts, which has performed well for me up until recently. For some reason, when I moved to Ubuntu 16.10 and PHP 7.x and…well, I’m not sure what the variable was—it stopped yielding good results.
My bounce rate went from 75% to over 85% as a result of it breaking.
So every couple of months I search unsuccessfully for a replacement—until now.
I just enabled Similar Posts, and wow—it’s remarkable.
I have around 3,000 posts in my database, and what I look for in a related posts plugin is the ability to harvest the other true nuggets on the site related to whatever’s being displayed.
Contextual Related Posts used to be pretty good at this, but this new plugin is 10x as good at it. Check out the example in the image above, and if you have a site I recommend you try it as well.
I increased the word depth to 500 words, but that was pretty much all I did. I’ll be working on displaying images at the bottom of posts instead of text, but other than that I’m already supremely pleased with it.
Hopefully my bounce rate will drop down to 75% or lower as a result of it being enabled.
Notes
The reason my bounce rate is so high is because so much of my traffic is tutorial-based. They need to know how to do something, they Google it, my site comes up, the click the link, they find the solution, and they leave. It’s not very often that someone stays around for a while after they’re done because they’re usually in the middle of working. But hopefully this plugin will make that more common due to the quality of the matches.