Contextual Related Posts free WordPress plugin

Contextual Related Posts is a powerful plugin for WordPress that allows you to display a list of related posts on your website and in your feed.

The list is based on the content of the title and/or content of the posts which makes them more relevant and more likely to be of interest to your readers. This allows you to retain visitors, reduce bounce rates and refresh old entries.

Although several similar plugins exist today, Contextual Related Posts is one of the most feature rich plugins with support for thumbnails, shortcodes, widgets, custom post types and CSS styles. The inbuilt cache ensures that you have related posts without excessive load on your server.

And the default inbuilt styles allow you to switch between gorgeous thumbnail-rich related posts or a similar text display!

Key features

• Automatic: CRP will start displaying related posts on your site and feed automatically after the content when you activate the plugin. No need to edit template files
• Manual install: Want more control over placement? Check the FAQ on which functions are available for manual install
• Gutenberg / Block Editor support: You can find a block called “Related Posts [CRP]” with its own configurable set of options
• Widgets: Add related posts to widgetized area of your theme. Lots of options available
• Shortcode: Use [crp] to display the posts anywhere you want in the post content
• REST API: Fetch related posts at contextual-related-posts/v1/posts//
• The algorithm: Find related posts by title and/or content of the current post
• Caching: Related posts output is automatically cached as visitors browse through your site
• Exclusions: Exclude posts from categories from being displayed in the list. Or you can exclude posts or pages by ID
• Custom post types: The related posts list lets you include posts, pages, attachments or any other custom post type!
• Thumbnail support:
  • Support for WordPress post thumbnails. CRP will create a custom image size (crp_thumbnail) with the dimensions specified in the Settings page
  • Auto-extract the first image in your post to be displayed as a thumbnail
  • Manually enter the URL of the thumbnail via WordPress meta fields. Specify this using the meta box in your Edit screens.
  • Optionally, use timthumb to resize images or use your own filter function to resize post images
• Styles: The output is wrapped in CSS classes which allows you to easily style the list. You can enter your custom CSS styles from within WordPress Admin area or use the style included.
• Customisable output:
  • Display excerpts in post. You can select the length of the excerpt in words
  • Customise which HTML tags to use for displaying the output in case you don’t prefer the default list format
• Extendable code: CRP has tonnes of filters and actions that allow any developer to easily add features, edit outputs, etc.

mySQL FULLTEXT indices

On activation, the plugin creates three mySQL FULLTEXT indices (or indexes) that are then used to find the related posts in the *_posts. These are for post_content, post_title and (post_title,post_content). If you’re running a multisite installation, then this is created for each of the blogs on activation. All these indices occupy space in your mySQL database but are essential for the plugin to run.

You have two sets of options in the settings page which allows you to remove these indices when you deactivate or delete the plugin. The latter is true by default.

GDPR

Contextual Related Posts is GDPR compliant as it doesn’t collect any personal data about your visitors when installed out of the box. All posts are processed on your site and not sent to any external service.

YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR ENSURING THAT ALL GDPR REQUIREMENTS ARE MET ON YOUR WEBSITE.

Donations

I spend a significant amount of my free time maintaining, updating and more importantly supporting this plugin. Those who have sought support in the support forums know that I have done my best to answer your question and solve your problem.
If you have been using this plugin and find this useful, do consider making a donation. This helps me pay for my hosting and domains.

Contribute

Contextual Related Posts is also available on Github.
So, if you’ve got some cool feature that you’d like to implement into the plugin or a bug you’ve been able to fix, consider forking the project and sending me a pull request.

Bug reports are welcomed on GitHub. Please note GitHub is not a support forum and issues that aren’t properly qualified as bugs will be closed.

Translations

Contextual Related Posts is available for translation directly on WordPress.org. Check out the official Translator Handbook to contribute.