The Related Posts feature scans all of your posts, analyzes them, and lets you show contextual posts your visitors might be interested in reading after they’re done with whatever post they’re on.
Most sites who activate this see an increase in traffic. Unlike many other related post plugins, we do all the analysis, processing, and serving from our cloud, so there is no additional load on your server. (That’s why many plugins like YARPP or Similar Posts are often banned by web hosts, but Jetpack Related Posts are allowed.)
To start using Related Posts, head to the Jetpack page in your blog’s dashboard and click the Activate button for Related Posts. You can also customize how the related posts section looks by going to your Settings → Reading page and scrolling down to the options next to “Related posts.”
You can opt to display a “Related” header to better separate the section from the end of your post — just check the box to show a “Related” header.
To make the section more visual, you can check the box next to “Use a large and visually striking layout” to display accompanying images next to the post titles.
Don’t forget to scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Save Changes” after you’re done.
For further customization options, please read the Customize Related Posts page.
General Information
- Related content will not appear unless we think we can show at least 3 good results (to avoid simply cross-linking posts with one another).
- Related content is automatically generated based on the content of the post and any tags or categories if they exist.
- This feature uses the WordPress.com infrastructure and mirrors your content there for indexing. If you see intermittent issues only affecting certain posts, you can request a reindex of your site under Jetpack → Debug (link in the footer) → Reindex.
- Related Posts for a given article are cached for 12 hours.
Details on Related Post Thumbnails
- A post’s featured image will appear as the thumbnail. If you haven’t set a featured image for the post, we will look for slideshows and galleries, and then for any images that may be attached to the post. If we don’t find any image attached to that post, we’ll look for single images you may have inserted in the post. If you’ve inserted an image that is hosted on another site, we can use it too.
- Thumbnails are resized and cropped automatically using Photon to be 350px wide by 200px tall (1.75:1 ratio) to allow for a consistent visual display. Since this is done automatically, there’s no way to fine-tune where the image is cropped.
