How to display related posts on your WordPress site
Most of the time we want to keep the visitors more on our websites, by providing them options to explore after they have finished reading the article or when scrolling down the page.
Related posts on your WordPress site?
Displaying related content is a good SEO practice, but also an opportunity for showing more of your content to visitors interested in some topics.
There are many ways in which you could decide how to make related content, but most of the time this is simplified to sticking to the same post tags or the same category for the articles sharing the same topics.
How to display related articles?
Many good plugins could help you do that, so you could install and activate one, and after that, you have to style the related content and make it look like a part of your page. You could write code in your theme, or develop a plugin.
If you already use the free Latest Post Shortcode WordPress plugin, and you already customized the look of the cards, you could simply generate a shortcode that you can embed anywhere you want, and that would inherit the styles and make the “related articles” look like part of your page.
Get related articles by category
See below an example of showing related articles based on some specified taxonomy, in this case, the category. If no terms (slugs separated by a comma) are provided, the categories of the current post will be used for determining the related content.
[lps_related_articles limit="2" taxonomy="category" terms="tips-tricks"]Are you interested in more programming tips and tricks?
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Get related articles by post tags
See below an example of showing related articles based on some specified taxonomy, in this case, the post_tag. If no terms (slugs separated by a comma) are provided, the post tags of the current post will be used for determining the related content.
[lps_related_articles limit="2" taxonomy="post_tag" terms="snippets"]Do you want to see more PHP snippets?
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Get related articles by a search key
The example below is showing related articles based on a specific search key. For the next example, I used Northern Lights.
[lps_related_articles limit="4" search="northern lights" title="Passionate about the Northern Lights? This might interest you:" image_ratio="16/9"]Passionate about the Northern Lights? This might interest you:
Arctic Getaway, Northern Lights & Unpredictable Weather Magic
Autumn in Lofoten We escaped our daily routine in October — work, deadlines, and the usual city…
February Getaway: Pagan’s Mind in Trondheim & The Night Flight Orchestra in Munich
February Getaway For a long time, Cezar and I have had a bucket list of bands…
Our First Trip to Finnish Lapland
Arrival in Oulu Our adventure began in the charming city of Oulu, where we spent two exciting days exploring the local culture…
Trip to Iceland, or how to continue the amazing adventure
Our new adventure in Iceland We always wanted to return to Iceland after our first adventure there back…
PHP Code Snippet
Here is a code snippet that registers a new shortcode you can embed on all the posts where you want to display the nice cards with related content.
<?php
declare( strict_types = 1 );
namespace IuliaCazanSnippets\RelatedContent;
\add_shortcode( 'lps_related_articles', __NAMESPACE__ . '\\lps_related_articles', 10 );
/**
* Related articles shortcode.
* Snippet by Iulia Cazan - https://iuliacazan.ro.
*
* @param array $args Shortcode arguments.
* @return string
*/
function lps_related_articles( $args ): string {
$args = \wp_parse_args( $args, [
'taxonomy' => '',
'terms' => '',
'search' => '',
'limit' => 4,
'display' => 'title,content-small',
] );
// You can put here the LPS shortcode base you want to use.
$base = 'latest-selected-content ver="2" limit="' . (int) $args['limit'] . '" display="' . \esc_attr( $args['display'] ) . '" titletag="h4" chrlimit="160" more="…" url="yes" image="thumbnail" elements="25" css="four-columns as-column has-shadow hover-zoom content-space-between light has-img-spacing" type="post" status="publish" orderby="dateD" show_extra="trim"';
if ( ! empty( $args['search'] ) ) {
$base .= ' search="' . \esc_attr( $args['search'] ) . '"';
$result = \do_shortcode( '[' . $base . ']' );
} elseif ( ! empty( $args['taxonomy'] ) ) {
if ( empty( $args['terms'] ) ) {
// Get dynamically the current post taxonomy terms.
$tax_terms = \wp_get_object_terms( \get_the_ID(), $args['taxonomy'], [ 'fields' => 'all' ] );
if ( ! empty( $tax_terms ) && ! \is_wp_error( $tax_terms ) ) {
$slugs = \wp_list_pluck( $tax_terms, 'slug' );
$terms = implode( ',', $slugs );
}
} else {
// Specified taxonomy terms.
$terms = $args['terms'];
}
if ( ! empty( $terms ) ) {
$base .= ' taxonomy="' . \esc_attr( $args['taxonomy'] ) . '" term="' . \esc_attr( $terms ) . '"';
$result = \do_shortcode( '[' . $base . ']' );
}
}
if ( ! empty( $result ) ) {
return '<h2>' . \__( 'Related Articles', 'lps' ) . '</h2>' . $result;
}
return '';
}