Introducing Related Posts
Do you ever wonder what happens when your readers reach the end of your posts? What do they click on? Where do they go next? What if you’ve piqued a reader’s interest and left them wanting more, but don’t give them the option to do so?
Today, we’re so happy to announce Related Posts on WordPress.com — one of the most requested features from users. Now, we’ll search your site for similar posts you’ve written and display a “Related” section at the end of every post, like this:
Related Posts section
If you post a lot of images, you can jazz this section up with post thumbnails as well. To activate image thumbnails, head to Settings → Reading and scroll down to the “Related Posts” section.
Thumbnails option enabled
It’s mobile ready of course:
Related Posts, mobile view
We’re excited about this feature — it allows your readers to dive deeper into your site and discover more of your content, keeping them satisfied and intrigued, and helps to drive more traffic to your site and its archives, giving your visitors more options to click around and stay engaged.
We’ve turned Related Posts on for all WordPress.com sites, but if you don’t want to use the feature just yet, or don’t think it’s for you, go to Settings → Reading, scroll down to the “Related Posts” section, and turn it off.
We hope you enjoy it — do let us know what you think about it. In the meantime, we’ll continue to fine-tune it so your experience is the best it can be!
- November 11, 2013
- New Features, Reading
WordPress.com News 
I think it’s good. I always liked the plug-in that enabled me to do this on my .org blog, but then I came back to .com and missed having that feature. So I’m very glad this has been implemented on .com. The thing that would take it from good to great would be if it could show thumbnail (as the ‘related content’ plug-ins one can download for .org blogs do).
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Hi Milo,
Post thumbnails is an option that we’ve defaulted to off for blogs because not everyone has nice looking images for each post. But you can turn on thumbnails for your blog by going to Settings → Reading and scrolling down to the “Related Posts” section.
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Jetpack please!
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This is exactly what we are working on right now. Stay tuned!
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Awesome!
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I’m thrilled to see this. Almost changed themes just to get this feature. I hope the “Relateds” will actually be related, but given the fallibility of algorithms, perhaps something more general like “Also on this blog” should be used. Or maybe an option to leave off the heading. Or fill in something of our own choosing. In any case, thanks WordPress.
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Glad to hear it! As for the relevancy, we are constantly working on fine tuning the results to try and make them better and would love to get your feedback when things go a bit wonky.
We’ve also included an option to turn off the “Related” header on your blog. Simply go to Settings → Reading on your Dashboard, scroll down to the “Related Posts” section and uncheck “Show a ‘Related’ header to more clearly separate the related section from posts”.
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Xiao, thanks for the reply. I’ve now made the setting change and have got thumbnails showing for my related posts. Very cool. Keep up the great work you guys! =)
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This is awesome! Have been waiting for this. Thank you.
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While I was reading I got excited. “Yes, another new feature,” then abruptly realized I already been using it, prior to this news. Now, I have a place to say load and clear, THANK YOU!
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Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!
Hooray for WordPress.com!
Thank you.
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This is a very cool option. Do like the thumbnails
But like Pied Type have a feeling some of the “related posts” won’t be related. A choice of title/phrase would be nice.
Still – very cool!
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Yes! I’ve been wanting to do this for so long. I saw that some of the bloggers I follow have related posts at the bottom of their blogs already.
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It´s fantastic!!!! but I can´t see that in my blog… And I´ve just came to visit the settings- reading place and check that related posts is on….
It could be because I´ve just 9 or 10 posts? I´m blogging just for one month…
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Oh you are so close, just one more post and you will see this feature on your blog! We are currently enforcing a minimum of 10 published posts before we show the Related Posts section.
This limit is currently in place to ensure we don’t end up just cross linking every post on the blog and that we have a good pool of content to judge relatedness of content.
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Can I turn it off? My readers are only interested in going to the next post, being a chronological novel… So it’s kind of annoying for me.
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We realize showing related content may not be suitable for every site, as such the feature can be turned off by going to Settings → Reading in your Dashboard and scrolling down to the “Related Posts” section.
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Thanks! That’s brilliant 🙂
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Thanks so much for this excellent feature which many bloggers have requested and waited so long for. I’m sure it will be appreciated.
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Thanks a lot for making WordPress experience better than it already is! 😉
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That’s nice to see. Its a neat feature to be implemented. Keep up the good work WP.
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OMG This is WHAT I Need…THIS!! THANK YOU
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Just noticed this feature in one of my posts and came looking for more information. It was a nice surprise to see it there. I recently started doing a ‘Kitchen Memories’ feature at the bottom of each post (okay, when I remember), providing links to posts one, two … years ago. That’s a lot of work! I may use both, one being chronological, and the other ‘related,’ (I’m assuming based on tags or categories?). Anyway, thank you! Off to change the settings now to enable the thumbnails.
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Its supercalifragilisticexpialidocious !! Thankyou kindly ♥
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Related Posts,,, at last! 🙂
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I think it is a great idea, I love it. I think wordpress is awesome and it just keeps getting better.
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Perfect! Thanks!
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I’m so excited to see this! Can I “like” this post 10 more times?
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Wow! I’m so happy about this! I’ve always been secretly jealous of other blogs which have this feature. Not any more! 🙂
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Good, good, good! I’ve been waiting for this. Happy 🙂 Thanks.
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Thank you so so much! ❤
I love wordpress.com every day even more!
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Yay! Have been wanting this feature, so thank you. Jane
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Nice addition. One of the comments I get (in person) from followers and others who check out my blog is that “comments” is not a very helpful word when they wish to do more in terms of my blog. Now that clicking “comments” at the end of a post includes Related as well as Like and Comments, perhaps a new term is needed to indicate what viewers/readers can do
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If your readers are on your home page, they can continue scrolling down to read more posts, or can check out your Recent Posts sidebar widget. You may also be interested in a Top Posts widget, as a way to feature your best articles. Right now, Related Posts are only available when a reader clicks through to the post (via the post title or comments).
You can also display the Like button and sharing buttons on your front page, via Settings ← Sharing. That way, your readers will be able to like or share your post while staying on the home page.
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This makes me VERY HAPPY!!!! Is there are way I can choose what posts appear as “related”?
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Currently there is no way to manually override the related post links, we are currently working on improving the quality of results so that for most of our bloggers “it just works”. 🙂
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Interesting feature, so far so good. Thank you.
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Love this feature. Thank you WordPress:)
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Great !! had always wanted this option, especially when I usd to see on other blogs.. Thanks…:)
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that’s awesome! It will be a great widget to be attached on my blog. 🙂
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So the related posts are based on category similarities? Can you make it (either additional or optional) so that tag similarities are calculated in the algorithm as well?
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Relatedness of the post currently takes into account the post title, content, tags and categories. We are constantly tweaking our algorithms and hope to improve on the quality of the results as time passes.
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Question: Do the thumbnails come from featured image? What if I have a related post which does not have any featured image but does have images in the body? Will WordPress grab the picture from the body?
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We will use the featured image as the thumbnail if it exists otherwise we will fallback to the first image in the post body.
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Thank you very, very much!! A so long wanted improve that will add more value to the reader experience (and to WordPress.com as well). The last very important thing it´s already here. Thanks to all the team and keep the good work!
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Cool feature to have. I’ve been doing the related articles manually, but this will be useful to have to connect readers to other recommendations.
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This is great, have been wishing for this. In fact, I saw that it was already activated on my blog a couple of days ago, but now I need to wait for a new post before it’s turned on?
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We turned this feature on for a number of blogs a couple days ago as part of a test and turned it on for everyone yesterday. Those that got this feature early were not disrupted and will continue to see related posts.
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I am glad this feature is now available. For the past several months of blogging I’ve been manually adding my Related Posts at the bottom of each blog entry (I’ve even asked an app developer friend to whip me up a code to generate the thumbnails) and it has definitely driven up my stats. If I have a particularly nice post, I see that people check out Related Posts almost automatically, so it triples (or even quadruples) my views each time.
Question, though: What factors contribute for a post being considered “related” to another post? Tags? Common phrases? I have noticed that the Related Posts have taken effect on my blog two days ago (so they now appear after my self-generated ones), but so far I can’t figure out how a post is deemed related to another.
Is there any way (or, can I possibly request this feature for the near future?) that we can select what appears on Related Posts? For now I’ll be sticking to my semi-manually added Related Posts. 😀
Thanks for heeding our requests, though! You rock, WordPress!
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Relatedness of the post currently takes into account the post title, content, tags and categories. We are constantly tweaking our algorithms to improve results so this may change at any time.
As for setting manual overrides for related posts we will certainly consider that for a future enhancement of related posts.
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Awesome! And thank you for answering my question.
Stay awesome, guys. 🙂
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I love this feature and just set it up on my blog! Thanks WordPress!
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This ia a great idea. I don’t have enough posts to warrant “related post” yet as I’m only on the 4th one but I do so look forward to that crucial time!
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Brilliant! I’ve been looking for this feature. Thank you WordPress!
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Yep love it!
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I love this feature! Finally it comes to WordPress.com! It would be better if I can choose how the related articles are display. Eg bigger thumbnails, in point form, number of related articles to display. Anyway, thank you WordPress team!
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Thanks nice feature
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A great feature! I think that the content is more magazine-like now.
Thank you wordpress!
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Lovely & exciting feature!
Thank you so much.
But does it work for all themes? It doesn’t work for “twenty thirteen”.
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This feature works on all themes hosted by WordPress.com. (We have turned it off for a couple themes that includes related content as part of the theme so as to not show 2 separate related content sections per post.)
That said there are some limits to when we show related post results, namely posts must have 500 bytes of content (about 100 english words) and there must be 10 published posts.
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This is great! Thank you!
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If my images are hosted externally on a service like photobucket, flickr or instagram, will they show in the thumbnails? Thanks!
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If there is an image from a 3rd party in your post as long as it’s publicly accessible we will use the WordPress.com servers to pull the image in, scale it to the appropriate size, then serve it as the post thumbnail.
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Fantastic! Thank you!
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This is a good feature, but I wish I had the option to choose the related posts manually when desired. I’ve put my own “related links” at the bottom of posts at times, and usually like to include one or more links from other blogs too.
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Thanks for the suggestion, we are considering adding manual overrides for related posts as a potential future enhancement.
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That would be cool, thanks!
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It is a nice feature and will work great on many sites but sadly I’ve had to turn it off as it doesn’t quite work for me as the suggested related posts are misleading. Thank you for allowing us the opportunity to enable or disable it though, very much appreciated.
My blog is a technical blog about restoring old Land Rovers and my categories are already setup to break posts down into specific areas of the vehicle so for example a post about fitting a new water pump will be in the ‘cooling system’ category, a post about repairing an alternator would be in the ‘electrics’ category etc, etc. The related posts feature is picking up posts across mutliple categories so is ending up virtually random.
It would work great if it could select posts from within the same category as that would then select genuinely related posts in my case.
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I’m sorry to hear that this feature was not able to find quality results for you, we are going to be tweaking the weightings of what is searched for and perhaps in the future we can automatically weight the results more heavily towards tags and categories for authors that fastidiously tag and categorize their content.
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Thanks Xiao,
Yes, I take care to categorise my posts quite well so they are in both a parent category for the vehicle/engine type and then the sub category of the specific area. I would not expect to see posts appear in related unless they were within the same sub category. There is no point in showing posts across categories as somebody wanting information on a 2.25 diesel injection system won’t be interested in the 200TDi injection system as they are completely and fundamentally different.
Would it not be possible to add a setting that we could enable which forced related posts to be within the same category level of the post being read?
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This is not possible at the moment but we will definably look into adding something along these lines in a future enhancement.
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Thank you for the related feature… I am keeping it turned on 🙂 🙂
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Fantastic! Thank you! I’d seen this on a friend’s blog and wondered how it could be done – thank you for introducing this feature here for those of us who aren’t tech-savvy enough to do it ourselves 🙂
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I love the feature but I have a question. How does it decide what’s related? Is it by categories, tags or something in the text?
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Relatedness of the post currently takes into account the post title, content, tags and categories. We are constantly tweaking our algorithms so this list of things is not set in stone. But as we tweak things we hope to improve on the quality of the results.
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This feature makes me happy.
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OMG, It’s about time. I am excited! woohoo
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Such a great feature! Just another reason why I will never hassle with going out on my own for my blog when I can get everything I need right here 🙂
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It would be good in future updates to consider removing the word count limit, as photo-blogs that rely on the images telling the story (rather than articles with several sentences of words), will miss out on this feature, and it would be a shame as a lot of people that visit these “gallery” type blogs would probably make greater use of the related content feature. It wouldn’t be such an issue if WordPress was purely for writing, but with so many photoblog themes relying on the images to tell their story, it means unless they add a few sentences they will get neglected.
For example, my humour site is purely for visual fun and is highly social media shareable and therefore does not need 100 words of explanation with each image. And yet misses out sharing related funny images of a similar subject matter because of the need for a large word count on each post.
I do however agree the need for a 10 post minimum, and maybe even a 3 tag minimum to allow for the system to correctly find related content, something even photoblogs can easily accomodate.
Excellent work all the same!
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These are exactly the parameters we will be tweaking in the future to try and get this feature to appear on more blogs / posts and hopefully with even better relevancy.
All I can say is thanks for the praise thus far and stay tuned!
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YES !
Thank you so much !
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I’m very happy with this new feature, but … I would prefer that the “Related” section appears just after the text of the post and not after other sections like “share with” etc
Thank you
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Thank you so much for this – I was manually adding something similar to the ends of my posts and now I don’t have too! Yay 🙂
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This is cool. It would be especially cool if STATS cold be provided showing the number of hits specifically from the related links.
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When you grab thumbnails, what are the ratios? If the original is a rectangle, does it make it a square? Also, what if there are no images on some posts and images on others and you use the thumbnail option? Will it leave a space as if there was an image?
Love this feature.
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When generating thumbnails we try to keep them as square as possible. We will use the featured image if it exists, otherwise we will grab the first image embedded into the post. If neither exists we will use the post author’s gravatar if it’s a site with many authors otherwise we will fallback to using a screenshot of the actual post.
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I had initially turned it off, kind of startled by the change. I appreciate stability.
I just turned it back on and the first post I clicked on showed posts that for the most part are truly related. I was pleasantly surprised as it seemed to use text within the post, rather than categories/tags. I use so few of them, that most posts will have maybe one or two. The only question I have is, will these related posts stay within my blog? I am kind of particular about content and would be concerned if links take readers to sites I would not visit myself.
Thank you so much for this new feature.
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Great, glad that you find this new feature useful!
This related posts feature will only pull posts from your own blog, (which is why we have a 10 published post minimum,) so rest assured, it will not put anything you don’t want into your blog.
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VERY happy to have this feature! Is there a way to adjust this so the images and fonts are larger, images and headlines are stacked, and so that it could display the full headline, etc?
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This feature was designed to make the related posts section as minimalist and unobtrusive as possible. However if you would like to customize the display of that section we do offer a Custom Design upgrade which will allow you to adjust the font and width to show more of the title.
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Hi all, as much as I like the general idea: The “related” posts now showing are in no way related to the posts where they show, possibly leaving my worried readers to wonder if I was entirely sober when I established those “relations”. So I am sorry to report I’ll turn them off (decision wht is related to what should – in my eyes – be left to the post authors).
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We realize automatically generated related posts are not for everyone nor are they suitable for every blog.
We are working on improving the quality of the links so that it’s a good no hassle solution for most of our post authors. In that regard, we would love to hear more about the problems you ran into when this feature was on so we can improve the relevancy for those that still have this feature enabled.
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It’s an amazing feature!
Thanks.
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I’m not seeing the related posts section show up on my blog http://illustrationage.com.
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Unfortunately we currently are unable to get get consistently good results for image heavy sites. As such we have imposted a minimum of 500 bytes of textual content (about 100 english words) before we show related posts. We are working on tweaking the systems to work with image heavy sites and hope to relax this restriction in the future.
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This is wonderful news – WordPress is the best! A question in relation to the Expound theme which I have been using lately. Expound has had related posts before, this is one of the features I choose it. But it seems like its related posts feature is different than the new feature for all other wp.com blogs. In the future, is Expound going to switch to the wp related posts feature, or will it remain an outsider in this regard? Thanks again.
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Expound will soon have its related posts feature powered by the global WordPress.com infrastructure so that it will benefit from improvements we make to boost relevancy of posts.
However because Expound has its own design and formatting for related posts it will not get any of the styling or configuration options that exist for the general WordPress.com related posts feature.
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You rock, thank you Xiao!
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Yes. I really liked this. It’s so long I look forward to this feature. Until I do it manually on each end of my article. And it seems now I can leave the manual way and handed it to the fitus.
Thank you wordpress
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I would like to suggest having a little more text appearing. On my blog (wordstodeeds.com) only part of the title shows (often not enough for readers to understand the content and know whether they want to click through or not).
Otherwise, like many others here, I’m delighted that the function has finally arrived.
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Good Idea to inform readers others topics and keep them a bit longer on your site!
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I was waiting for this for a so long time. WordPress.com Team and Community is the best. Thank you so much.
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Thank you, Love it, Love it, Love it!!!
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Sounds like a great feature! Doesn’t seem to be working right now for my blog posts….I did turn on the feature. I’ll check tomorrow. My theme is Twenty Eleven. Would this be for new blog posts going forward only?
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This feature is on for all blogs I just checked your blog and it appears that related posts is currently working properly. If you are still having problems please contact support via the WordPress.com forums.
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You’re right. It must have happened a few hrs. afterward I commented earlier here. 🙂
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This isn’t a new feature though, is it? I remember this from when I started, about five years ago.
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Something similar was introduced awhile ago however we had to turn it off for a couple reasons. We then took all the comments and complaints that people had for that initial related posts functionality and completely redesigned and rebuilt it for this new iteration.
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So happy ; this is a real blog booster!
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I have to agree with everyone else. Totally love it. Been waiting for this feature for years. 😎
Why is the top border only assigned to the string “Related” and not to the “jp-relatedposts” div? The small line looks weird compared to the Likes, Rating, Sharedaddy and G+ sections. All these sections have a border that – at least on Truly Minimal – stretches across the whole content column. How about removing the border-top from “div.jp-relatedposts .jp-relatedposts-headline em:before” and assigning the “sd-block” class?
A downside is the worsening of the pagination problem. With another section below our posts, the pagination links tend to move even further away from the content.
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Thanks for the comments! We are currently working on some redesigns of that post footer section that will hopefully solve some of these issues.
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Thank you so much for this! Really helpful!
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Related post? Can’t wait to get there!
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This is a great idea, thanks very much for implementing it. Is it possible to set this feature so that the entire title of the “related” post appears, rather than just the first few words of the title? Not all of my posts have short titles, and for some of those posts it is difficult to tell what the post is about without the whole title showing – so it is unlikely that readers will click through to look at it.
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I’d also like the option of choosing what the related posts are, or even just seeing what they are before publishing. Thanks!
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Thanks! This is an awesome feature!
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Fantastic, I have been craving for this function for so long. Could you tell us what is the logic behind it? I mean does it take into account more the “Categories” or the “Tags” of each post, or other? Thank-you, great work 🙂
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@HoarderComesClean, that is a great suggestion for further improvement! 🙂
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Hmm. I was really excited to see this feature since I’ve been wanting it for awhile, but I don’t even have the option to turn it on. Grrr.
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