Replacing nRelate with Jetpack Related Posts

In the past few years, we have covered various decent content recommendation and related posts plugins. Unfortunately, many of these plugins are not well-coded enough for most servers to handle them. There a few that are cloud-based and don’t put any load on your server, but they do cost you if your site gets a lot of hits. In the past, we have relied on nRelate plugins to show related posts on our sites. With that service going away, we decided to give Related Posts for Jetpack a look.

In order to get started, you need to have Jetpack installed. Once you go to Jetpack > Settings, you will be able to activate and configure the Related Posts feature. We have all other Jetpack features turned off, so that is something you may want to consider doing. Users get to show a related header and use a “large and visually striking layout” to show related posts. To customize your related posts headline or remove the feature, you will need to add the following to your functions.php file (more useful code snippets here):

Why would you want to remove the feature through your “functions” file? To change where your related posts show up. nrelate users can simply change the first line in the below screenshot with the second line.

There are plenty of other ways to customize your Related Posts. We found Jetpack’s Related Posts to be easy to use. Is it as accurate as other related posts plugins we have tested? Not always. But for now it does the job. What do you think? What’s your favorite related posts plugin?