Do you want to increase your site’s click-through rate? Looking for a way to get your readers to check out the related content you’ve published?

YARPP: Quick Review

The Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) uses an advanced algorithm that factors in the posts’ categories, tags, and custom taxonomies to find related posts on your site and recommend them to your readers. The plugin also has a premium version that you can upgrade to for more relatedness (i.e. include the post’s title and content in the algorithm) and display options.

If you’d like to read up a bit more about what the plugin can do then be sure to check out my review on Design Bombs. And if you’d like to try it out on your own site then head over to this video tutorial.

A Developer’s Perspective

I’m always on the lookout for high-quality plugins that work with custom post types since a lot of my clients use them on their websites. This is why YARPP is one of my favorite (and most recommended) related posts plugin for WordPress.

Another feature that I really like about the plugin is that it lets me “customize” the related posts algorithm that it runs on the posts/pages archives. What this means is that it allows me to define a match threshold and define how related the posts it finds should be. This allows me to fine tune the algorithm that runs on a client’s site based on how their specific content production strategy.

Pros

  • Allows you to customize the related posts algorithm.
  • Offers support for custom post types.

Cons

An Average User’s Perspective

As an average user, I initially had some trouble with YARPP’s Relatedness options since the free version of the plugin doesn’t allow you to take your post’s title or content into account in the related posts algorithm. And since my site was small and I didn’t have a lot of posts published on it, the plugin wasn’t able to find related posts – even with the lowest match threshold.

Basically, if you’re going to use YARPP on your WordPress website, you’re going to need to have a fair amount of content on it with categories and tags added to each post. This is because the plugin will essentially be using the categories and tags that you’ve assigned to each post to find related content.

Pros

  • Easy to configure and setup.
  • Lets you customize the related posts’ display options.

Cons

  • You’ll need to have a fair amount of content on your site (with categories and tags) to be able to use the plugin.

To Sum It Up

Should you use YARPP on your WordPress website?

If you’re a WordPress developer then you should use YARPP because it can definitely help improve your clients’ blog and increase their site’s click-through rate. It’ll even work with custom post types!

And if you’re an average user, you’ll need to have a fair amount of content published on your site complete with categories and tags before you can leverage YARPP to its full potential.

Review
YARPP
Tutorial