Please read this first!
Most blogs or news sites have it: a block in or below the post called “More in this category”, “You might also like” or “Related posts”. Followed by a number of posts that might interest you. This is a nice and effective method to keep visitors engaged.
Adding related posts to your post is also good for internal links and keeping your bounce rate lower.
Related posts plugin
For the developers among us it is possible to show related posts without a plugin. Many developers have written very usable code to do so.
For those who aren’t developers, plugins are very helpful. That is why I chose the plugin Yuzo – Related Posts. According to the developer the fastest related posts plugin ever.
Options of Yuzo
Yuzo comes with many options to choose from. A selection of the most important options:
- Up to 50 related posts per post
- Relations can be set by category, tag, post type or a combination
- Exclude posts per page, category, tag, post type or specific posts
- Automatically add the related posts section to the end of the post
- Manually add the related posts anywhere in your theme with code
- Show a random post if no related posts where found based on the conditions
- A widget
- View count
- Shortcodes and php-code to show related posts and number of views anywhere you like
You can also configure the design of the related posts:
- Four different templates
- Thumbnail size
- Background color
- Font size and title length
- The number of characters of he beginning of the post
- Custom CSS
Do you want to see the related posts in action? Just scroll down and you will find them!
Number of views
A very nice feature of Yuzo Related Posts is being able to show the number of views. You can see the number of views in the related posts section behind the title of the post.
Performance
One of the advantages of the plugin, according the developer, is the speed of the plugin. My experience so far is that this plugin doesn’t slow the website down. It looks like the plugin lives up to its expectations!
Yuzo has some additional options for enhancing the performance. These options are not recommended when using a caching plugin.
