Adding related posts to individual posts is a proven enough practice to have your visitors stay longer on your website. After they are done reading a certain article on your website, they can switch to another article which they find on the suggested items on the related posts section. Commonly, related posts are placed right beneath the article or above the comment section. If you have a WordPress-based website and are interested to add related posts to individual posts, this article will show you how.

The methods of adding related posts are varied on each WordPress site, depending on the theme you use. Some WordPress themes like Newspaper and Divi have a built-in feature to add related posts. You can go to the settings panel belongs to the associated theme if it comes with this feature. Otherwise, you can use one of the following methods.

Adding related posts using a plugin

If the theme you use offers no setting option to add related posts to the individual posts, the easiest way to add ones is by using a plugin. One of the plugins we recommend is Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP). The plugin allows you to add related posts based on the following parameters:

• Title
• Body
• Category
• Tag

You can use YARPP for free. To start adding related posts using the YARPP plugin, first, install it first. Go to the Plugins -> Add New on your WordPress dashboard. Type Yet Another Related Posts on the search field. Once you found the plugin, click the Install Now button and activate the plugin right away once installed.

By default, the YARPP plugin displays the related posts in the form of texts (without the thumbnails). If you want to display the thumbnails or want to set different parameters, you can go to Settings -> YARPP on your WordPress dashboard. You can change the display option on the Automatic Display Options section. From this section, you can also set the content types where the related posts to be displayed as well as the maximum number of the related posts.

To change the default parameters, you can go to the The Algorithm section. You can set the match threshold and include parameters like title, bodies, categories, and tags to be considered by YARPP to display the related posts.

Don’t forget to click the Save Changes button once you are done making the settings on the YARPP settings page.

Adding related posts by creating a custom single post template

Another option to add related posts to individual posts is by creating a custom single template for your WordPress site. In addition to adding the related posts, this option also allows you to add other elements such as an author box, email opt-in form, or even custom fields. There are a bunch of plugins to create a custom single post template in WordPress. One of which is Elementor, which will use in this article.

Elementor is the most popular WordPress page builder plugin that has a very intuitive visual editor. You can create your custom single post template using it (the visual editor). Everything is drag and drop. You don’t need to touch any single line of code.

To be able to create a custom single post template using Elementor you need to use the pro version as its theme builder feature (the feature to create a custom single post template) is only available on the pro version. You can download the pro version of Elementor on its official website. If you are new to Elementor, you can read this article to learn how to create a custom single post template using it. In this article, we will go straight to adding the Posts widget and then set it to display the related posts. You can also read this article to learn how to add related posts in Elementor, by the way.

Once you are ready, drag the Posts widget to the canvas area. You can place it beneath the content area or anywhere to your liking.

Once the Posts widget is added, you can go to the settings panel (panel on the left side) to make the settings. You can make the basic settings such as setting the layout, number of columns, excerpt length, etc on the Layout block under the Content tab.

Once done making the basic settings on the Layout block, you can open the Query block to make the settings to set the Posts widget to display the related posts. First, set the Source to Related. Next, set the parameters on the Include By field. You can set the Posts widget to display the related posts based on categories, tags, or authors.

You can then go to the Style tab to style up the related posts. There are 4 setting blocks you can open on this tab as shown below.

• Layout

You can open this block to set the alignment of the text content of the posts (title and meta). You can also set the gap between columns and rows.

• Box

You can open this block to set the border width of the box, border radius, border color, and background color. Box itself refers to the container of each post on the related posts.

• Image

You can open this block to set the border radius of the post thumbnails. You can also apply CSS filters if you want it.

• Content

You can open this block to set the typography (font style, font family, font size, and so on) and the text color of the text content (title, meta, and read) of the related posts.

That’s it. Once you are done editing your custom template, you can click the PUBLISH/UPDATE button on the bottom side of the settings panel to publish/update the template.

The bottom line

As the site owner, it’s your job to retain your visitors to stay longer on your website. One of the practices adopted by many site owners to retain the visitors to stay longer on their site is by adding related posts to individual posts. By doing it, your visitors will be able to find more articles related to the one they are reading. And the expectation is that they will read the related posts as well. In WordPress, the methods of adding related posts are varied depending on your situation.