Related Posts (Classic Editor)

The Related Posts feature scans all of your post content, analyzes it, and uses the results to display additional posts your visitors might be interested in reading after they’re finished with the current post.

Most sites that 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 Jetpack Related Posts are allowed on web hosts even when similar plugins are banned.

Note: This page describes how to use Related Posts when using the Classic Editor plugin. We have a separate article for using Related Posts with the Block Editor.

To start using Related Posts, go to Jetpack → Settings → Traffic page and activate “Show related content after posts”.

Related Posts in the Classic Editor

If you’re using the Classic Editor, Related Posts will display after your post content.

You can opt to display a “Related” header to better separate the section from the end of your post — just activate the “Highlight related content with a heading” option.

You can also choose whether you’d like to include the thumbnail or not. If you’d prefer to display only links, you can disable “Show a thumbnail image where available”.

For further customization options, please read the Customize Related Posts page.

General Information

1. 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).
2. Related content is automatically generated based on the content of the post and any tags or categories if they exist.
3. 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 by clicking on initiate a sync manually under Data synchronization, at the bottom of your WordPress.com Settings → General → Manage connection page.
4. Related Posts for a given article are cached for 12 hours.

Details on Related Post Thumbnails

1. 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, provided it includes width and height parameters that can inform Jetpack about the image size. (If no such parameters exist, Jetpack has no way of knowing if the images will be big enough, and thus they are ignored.)
2. Thumbnails are resized and cropped automatically using the Jetpack image CDN 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. However, you can change the size of the cropped image by using the jetpack_relatedposts_filter_thumbnail_size filter.

Privacy Information

The Related Posts feature is deactivated by default. It can be deactivated any time by toggling the Show related content after posts setting in the Related posts section from Jetpack > Settings > Traffic in your dashboard.