5+ Best Free Related Posts Plugins for WordPress (Most Popular 2023)

Updated: Oct 16, 2023 By: Dessign Team

Are you looking for the best free related posts plugin for WordPress? to get your readers engaged and stay on your site longer. If you bounced rate is increasing then you need to add to your website a related or similar posts plugin to show your readers other relative posts on specific topic.

To get them engaged and keep their interest high, once your visitors see that you have other posts related to the topic it's more likely that you did more research and are the authority on this topic by having more articles about it.

Related posts plugins will help your users find more relative articles otherwise they would never found out, and this will make them stay on your website longer and decrease your bounce rate.

With those best free related posts plugins for WordPress you can easily automate this process which is great for beginners to start using one of those plugins to have higher reader attention.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) is a professionally maintained and feature rich plugin that displays pages, posts, and custom post types related to the current entry, introducing your readers to other relevant content on your site. Automatically added Related Posts can increase your pageviews up to 10%. Just install and activate.

Key Features

Thumbnail or list view of related content.
Related posts, pages, and custom post types.
Templating: The YARPP templating system gives you advanced control of how your results are displayed.
An advanced and versatile algorithm: Using a customizable algorithm considering post titles, content, tags, categories, and custom taxonomies, YARPP finds related content from across your site.
Related posts in feeds: Display related posts in RSS feeds with custom display options.

Contextual Related Posts is a powerful plugin for WordPress that allows you to display a list of related posts on your website and in your feed.

The list is based on the content of the title and/or content of the posts which makes them more relevant and more likely to be of interest to your readers. This allows you to retain visitors, reduce bounce rates and refresh old entries.

Although several similar plugins exist today, Contextual Related Posts is one of the most feature rich plugins with support for thumbnails, shortcodes, widgets, custom post types and CSS styles. The inbuilt cache ensures that you have related posts without excessive load on your server.

Related Posts Thumbnails Plugin for WordPress

Related Posts will add related posts thumbnails after the post. This Related Posts Plugin allows to customize thumbnail sizes, display settings and type of relation.

By default it uses generated by WordPress thumbnail for the first image appeared in the post, that was uploaded on the server with sizes as set in Media settings. You can select between ‘thumbnail’ and ‘medium’ size options. In addition if your theme supports Post Thumbnails feature introduced in WordPress 2.9 you can specify custom thumbnail size. You can also specify post custom field name to be used as thumbnails source.

When somebody visits your site, a great way of increasing your pageviews is to persuade them to stay on your site for longer by reading more content that’s relevant to them.

One common way of doing this is to link to other pages or posts on your site from within your content body. This however has three disadvantages: 1) it is manual and time-consuming, 2) readers often don’t want to click away before they’ve finished reading, and 3) it is very hard to go back and update old posts to link to newer content.

Quickly increase your readers’ engagement by adding related posts in the sidebar or after post content with a widget or shortcode.

Posts with the most terms in common will display at the top!

This plugin is capable of finding related posts in multiple taxonomies and post types. Include or exclude terms from the search for related posts. Change the look and feel by using your own templates in a (child) theme.

In Inline related posts we take care of the marketing aspects of your WordPress site and today we have brought to you the same technology they use, to help you to increase engagement, page views and to reduce the bounce rate.

Conclusion:

Hope this list of the best free related posts plugins for WordPress help you decide which plugins works for you. Each of those plugins has pros and cons so make sure you read what specific features they have and what you need for your site. Since they are all free plugins you can try to install and see which one is the best and easiest one to use. Overall each of those plugins should be super easy to use even for beginners to help you increase traffic to your site and keep visitors engaged to help you decrease your bounce rate.