Keeping your visitors engaged by showing related posts is a good way to reduce bounce rate. You would want visitors to stick to your site/blog and view more content which ultimately will benefit you.
Many times users complain that visitors come from search engine or from some other source, they check out one page and then go away. In such a case, showing related or similar posts that interests visitors is a good idea. That’s where you can use related posts plugin for WordPress to show related content to your visitors that interests them. This means visitors will likely spend more time browsing your site. But how about displaying related posts with thumbnails, rather than plain boring text links? Those thumbnails will definitely attract more visitors and it would be an icing on the cake. In this article, we will take a look at 4 such related posts plugin with thumbnails for WordPress.
YARPP
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) is perhaps the most popular plugin of the lot. This plugin has been around from a long time and many popular blogs are using it. The new version now supports displaying related posts via thumbnails, while the older version was just displaying the text. The related posts can be fetched from posts, pages and also from custom post types.
The templating system gives users more advanced control on how results are displayed. The developer says that YARPP caches related data, and it also has the option to display related posts in RSS feeds.
Front-end preview:
Wp-Thumbie
WP-Thumbie plugin displays a list of related posts along with thumbnail images. You have the option to select the number of related posts to display on articles as well as on feeds.
Some other options that you can control are: size of thumbnails, length of excerpt, display style, include or exclude pages, manually add related posts via code, exclude certain categories and more. Image resizing of thumbnails is done via the TimThumb php script. The plugin does not offers many styling options, but does a good job of displaying related posts with thumbnails, along with post excerpts.
Here’s how it will look in front-end:
Related Posts Thumbnails
The Related Posts Thumbnails comes with some nice customizable options which allows users to change thumbnail sizes, change number of related posts, enable/disable certain categories to appear in related posts, change default image, styling options, decide relation based on categories, tags, categories and tags, random and custom and many more.
Here’s how it will look in front-end:
Contextual Related Posts
The Contextual Related Posts plugin allows you to to display a list of related posts on your website and in your feed, along with a thumbnail. 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 will help you to reduce bounce rates and retain visitors.
The plugin supports thumbnails, shortcodes, widgets, custom post types, caching and CSS styles. It has many more advanced options that makes it a highly customizable related posts plugin.
So that’s it. These 4 plugins can display related post with thumbnail, rather than the plain boring text. These are sure to increase page views for your WordPress based site. Try it out and let me know which one is your favorite.