If you know anything about bounce rate, you are probably already showing related posts in WordPress. Bounce rate essentially represents the percentage of initial visitors to a site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site. This can have a significant impact on your adsense earning. By adding Related posts in WordPress you are killing three birds with one stone. You are decreasing your bounce rate, you are increasing your adsense income, and lastly you are increasing your pageviews. In this article we will show you how you can display related posts in WordPress with and without a plugin.
There are two methods of doing so and you can choose whichever method you prefer. One way is doing it without a plugin and then there is another method that is doing it with a plugin.
Display Related Posts in WordPress without a Plugin
Paste the following code in single.php where you want to display related posts
<?php
//for use in the loop, list 5 post titles related to first tag on current post
$tags = wp_get_post_tags($post->ID);
if ($tags) {
echo 'Related Posts';
$first_tag = $tags[0]->term_id;
$args=array(
'tag__in' => array($first_tag),
'post__not_in' => array($post->ID),
'posts_per_page'=>5,
'caller_get_posts'=>1
);
$my_query = new WP_Query($args);
if( $my_query->have_posts() ) {
while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); ?>
<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
<?php
endwhile;
}
wp_reset_query();
}
?>
Source: MichaelH
Display Related Posts in WordPress with a Plugin
The plugin we use is called Yet Another Related Post Plugin (YARP). It gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site. Key features include:
- An advanced and versatile algorithm: Using a customizable algorithm considering post titles, content, tags, and categories, YARPP calculates a “match score” for each pair of posts on your blog. You choose the threshold limit for relevance and you get more related posts if there are more related posts and less if there are less.
- Templating: New in 3.0! A new templating system puts you in charge of how your posts are displayed.
- Caching: New in 3.0! YARPP now caches the related posts for all the posts and thus has significantly improved performance over versions 2.x.
- Related posts in RSS feeds: Display related posts in your RSS and Atom feeds with custom display options.
- Disallowing certain tags or categories: You can choose certain tags or categories as disallowed, meaning any page or post with such tags or categories will not be served up by the plugin.
- Related posts and pages: Puts you in control of pulling up related posts, pages, or both.
abraham says
are i safe by posting that code to my site?
WPBeginner Support says
For safely using a web snippet like the one from this article, we would recommend taking a look at our article below:
https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/beginners-guide-to-pasting-snippets-from-the-web-into-wordpress/
Admin
Marcel says
Very nice article but how can this be done with custom taxonomies? And can I add featured images of the related posts?
WPBeginner Support says
For adding the thumbnail, you would want to take a look at our article here: https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-themes/how-to-add-related-posts-with-a-thumbnail-without-using-plugins/
For a custom taxonomy, depending on how you set it up, you would want to use wp_get_post_terms instead of wp_get_post_tags
Admin
HAMID says
yet another related posts plugin is no longer available for download.
SO WHAT IS THE ALTERNATIVE?
WPBeginner Support says
Thank you for letting us know about the plugin being unavailable, we have a list of alternatives here: https://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/5-best-related-posts-plugins-for-wordpress/
Admin
Bill says
Nice article. But how can I show the latest ones?
WPBeginner Support says
Hi Bill,
Please see our article on how to show recent posts in WordPress.
Admin
jack says
is there any way that i show visitors a code which shows my related post or recent post in their websites?
Fintan says
If I use this code, will it open the posts up in a new window or the same window.
Mohammed Khaled says
Hey,
Thank you for this useful post,
but i need to know What is the -ID- in line below return to…
$tags = wp_get_post_tags($post->ID);
Scortt says
Mohammed, $post is a variable that is holding a WordPress object. The object contains many things, one of which is the id number of the post.
andi says
i added this code in single.php i wordpress theme but not work
Judy Hicks says
I have set my posts to display recent posts from the post category. When I have a post with more than one category, I get 2 instances of recent posts. Is there a way to tell the plugin to limit to the first category instance? thanks!
Aamir says
Is there any way to show the related post in between the blog post, I mean somewhere middle of the post, as per choice.
Aamir shahzad says
You can do this with shortcode
dineshkashera says
nice job, code working fine.
thanks
Mike G says
What plugin allows to display related post/pages on pages by “manually” selecting the pages that are related? Thank you
Paranoya says
This is it
Mike says
Hi, thanks for your awesome website!
I have a question and would be grateful if your answer it; I have problem with both ways in this post regarding displaying relatedpost in my blog, if I add the related posts to the end of each post manually, then is that ok in terms of seo (or anything else)?
Kind regards,
Mike
Sumit Kumar Gogawat says
Great Post!
I want to know how to add Related post right after first paragraph or middle in post in wordpress. can you please update me.
WPBeginner Support says
See our guide on how to add inline related posts in WordPress.
Admin
Kyler Boudreau says
Thanks for this info! Exactly what I needed.
JMunce says
I don’t get ‘related posts’ from this code.
I just get recent posts
Debb says
How about second tag? Can i change $first_tag to $second_tag?
Ben Chung says
Thanks for the great tip.
One thing I noticed is that I got an error when running it:
“WP_Query was called with an argument that is deprecated since version 3.1! “caller_get_posts” is deprecated. Use “ignore_sticky_posts” instead. ”
So replacing:
‘caller_get_posts’ => 1
with:
‘caller_get_posts’ => 1
fixed the problem.
Thanks.
Ben Chung says
Sorry, I meant, replace it with:
‘ignore_sticky_posts’ => 1
David says
This is great. Please direct me to how I can add a post image and date. Thanks!
Sam says
Appreciate the tutorial! Very simple to implement.
One question, does this only match articles by matching their first tag?
Thanks
Allie says
I am also using Genesis and there is not single.php form. Where do I input this? Thanks!
Chris Arter says
This code can be put in your functions file depending on what location of the page you’d like. for instance..
add_action(‘genesis_after_entry_content’,’myRelatedPosts’);
if (is_singluar(‘post’)) {
// your related posts code here
}
The best place to put this is in your own plugin. Try not to edit your Functions file..
Chris Arter says
Whoops, typo above. Should be is_singular
Jornes says
Hi! I did apply this code to my website sidebar. But, i am wondering why it doesn’t work after i have implemented a php code that calls this function to work when the page is single.php. Do you know what is going wrong?
Dave Noel says
You can insert ads at runtime using jquery. That’s what I do.
Clay Teller says
Thanks for this useful bit of code! I think ordering the results randomly can be helpful for some sites to keep the related posts “fresh”. Can be done by adding ‘orderby’=>’rand’ argument like so:
$args=array(
‘tag__in’ => array($first_tag),
‘post__not_in’ => array($post->ID),
‘posts_per_page’=>5,
‘caller_get_posts’=>1,
‘orderby’=>’rand’
);
Sam says
Thanks Clay, useful!
Szyam says
Very nice! Looks like ‘caller_get_posts’ Now needs to be ‘ignore_sticky_posts’ instead. Works great.
Russ Edwards says
Works great, but how would I split the results. I want to put an ad in between, so it would be, for example, 5 related posts -then ad- next five related posts, etc. i know there should be an “offset” somewhere in the second query, just not sure how or where it insert. help?
Tom Nguyen says
Thanks for posting both ways of doing this. I prefer not to use another plugin. I’m going to try on my website since I have more than 20 blog posts.
Sid says
I’m using Genesis and you know, there’s no separate single.php file. So, where should I paste this? In functions file? Also, is there something to edit at stylesheet?
Danny says
Whoop! Whoop! Thanks so much for this code, I have been search for about a week, and this works just great once you style it.
Thanks alot!
Eline says
I don’t know how this work, and on linkwithin it doesn’t work, my blog isn’t slef-hosted! Help:(
Editorial Staff says
Our tutorials are only for self-hosted blogs.
Admin
Rodrigo Ghedin says
I’m using and enjoying the manual solution. But I miss a conditional trigger for situations when there aren’t related posts. Right now it returns nothing. How could I fill that space with a “there’s no related posts” when… well, when there’s no related posts?
Thanks!
s.i says
is easiest if use has_tag insted of $tags
if (has_tag( ‘mytag’ ))
else
Nadine says
I’m trying to change ‘showposts’ to 12 but it only shows up 2 items. Any ideas why? :/
Editorial Staff says
Just updated the article Nadine. showposts parameter have been depracated with posts_per_page.
Admin
Vincentb says
Can you please add some more detail to your explanation? What do you mean by ‘tag version”? What file do I add the code above to (page.php?) and what do I change in that code to make it do what I described above?
Thanks.
Serg, your plugin only works on Posts, is there a way to make it work on Pages too?
sara says
I’m looking for something similar to this but based on categories. I would like to only display related articles from the current category.
I have searched for a solution but can’t seem to find anything, any idea’s?
Thanks
Editorial Staff says
Here is the article that you should look at:
https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-themes/how-to-add-related-posts-with-a-thumbnail-without-using-plugins/
Admin
will says
very use full thanks installed the YARP plugin and it works better than i thought it would thanks.
Abhijit V. Chaore says
Sounds quite useful. Thanks for the information.
Paisakamana says
Really great piece of code you got there.
Great article I used this on my site and I like.
brynh says
Very good article! It helped me much! Thank you.. I installed YARP and it works great..
Chris Roane says
Thanks for providing the code. I needed something that was similar to this, but that took into account all of the tags for a post to generate the related posts.
So I modified the code and posted it on my website. I did put a link to this page in the article. Here is the article that I wrote: http://www.montanaprogrammer.com/php-web-programming/add-related-posts-to-wordpress/
Taylor says
Thank you for linking to this! I was looking for a way to show related posts based on all tags and not just the first one.
Thanks!
Vincent says
(revised comment)
I’ve been looking for a way of adding POSTS related to specific tags on the bottom of PAGES I have created. EG: POSTS that are related to the pyramid of Teti…
http://www.talkingpyramids.com/tag/teti/
…on the bottom of the Pyramid of Teti PAGE:
http://www.talkingpyramids.com/saqqara/pyramid-of-teti/
At the moment I’ve just added the tags at the bottom of the PAGE but would be much better to have exerpts of the related POSTS added.
Is there a way I can adapt the code that you have given to do this?
Thanks.
Editorial Staff says
Yes you can. Use this code and the tag version. Display WordPress Related Posts without a plugin
Admin
Vincent says
Gee, thanks for the fast response!
I’ll give that code a whirl.
matthew says
Great tip! thanks for sharing this
Dario Gutierrez says
Excellent, buy how can i put a thumbnail? Thanks.
Sal Surra says
Great tip! Works perfectly and thanks for sharing this. I like the tip as it shows my recent posts in a nice lists view.
palmamod says
Hey, I implemented the non-plugin version of this and am 99% happy with it. I know it’s not you who have developed it but maybe you could help. If you check the posts on my blog, you will see that 5 posts are displayed (matching the first tag of the post) but “in line”. Do you know how can I tweak this so that a list occurs? Like, tweaking the php so that a and tags are created?
Thanks a lot and keep up the good job!
Editorial Staff says
Simply add the < li > tag around the a href tag. the link tag.
Admin
Vin says
I’ve been looking for a way of adding posts related to specific tags on the bottom of pages I have created. EG: Posts that are related to the pyramid of Teti…
http://www.pyramidofman.com/blog/tag/teti/
…on the bottom of the Pyramid of Teti page:
http://www.pyramidofman.com/blog/saqqara/pyramid-of-teti/
At the moment I’ve just added the tags at the bottom of tghe page but would be much better to have exerpts of the related posts added.
Is there a way i can adapt the code that you have given to do this?
Thanks.
@Sergej,
Do you have a link?
Editorial Staff says
Cannot access your site. Database connection error.
For Sergej, use the link associated with his name. It takes you to his website and the link to the plugin is there.
Admin
Sergej Müller says
See also my plugin for related posts by category.
Ileaneb says
Does this work for wordpress.com as well? Are the instructions the same?
Editorial Staff says
If you can install the plugin, then yes it will work. If you can change the codes in theme then it will work.
Admin