If you are looking to add a related post section to your WordPress blog, then you have noticed that there are a bunch of plugins to do so. “Which one is the best?”, “Which one displays the best related posts?” are some of the questions that you must have been wondering. One of the best one for displaying related posts with thumbnails is the WordPress plugin nRelate Related Content.
It is a very good idea to display related posts to your visitors. Once a visitor has finished reading your post, you can keep that person longer with the help of interesting related posts. This way your page views will increase and it is good for your website. It is also a good idea to display related posts with thumbnails right at the end of a post. This part receives a great amount of attention and is quite suitable for displaying more content. You must have seen a lot of other blogs do the same. You can even use the sidebar for this purpose.
See: Ways You Can Install a WordPress Plugin?
After you have installed nRelate to your WordPress website and activated it, the first thing that this plugin does is index your website. Click on “nRelate”, a new admin link in WordPress admin and you will see the message “nRelate has started indexing your site!” Wait for a while and after the indexing is done, you will be able to use this.
Once the indexing process is complete, you will get a message “Indexing complete: nRelate plugin is ready to go and should now be appearing on your site.” This means that related content will appear on your website automatically. You don’t have to add additional lines of code to your template.
What Does Related Posts Look Like?
Below or above posts with thumbnail and titles
On the sidebar with just titles
Some mentionable features of nRelate plugin for WordPress:
(Visit nRelate > Dashboard or nRelate > Related Content to access these features)
- The ability to select how many posts to display as related content.
- Based on indexing and nRelate’s understanding of your content, you can choose how related your contents should be: Low, Medium or High.
- Choose between thumbnails with text or text only links to related posts. You can also exclude post title.
- You can choose to display the excerpt of your topics.
- Choose where you display related content i.e. before or after posts.
- You can also use nRelate widget to display related posts in the sidebar.
- Choose the size of your thumbnail.
- Specify a default image if a post does not have a thumbnail.
- If you don’t specify a default thumbnail, nRelate has its own gallery of default thumbnails.
- If your featured image is present in a custom field of a WordPress post, then you can specify that field to be used in nRelate as well.
- Specify a title for related content like “Related Topics:”, “You May Like:” etc.
- If you have a large amount of posts, you can choose how many years back you want to go for related content.
- You can also exclude categories.