Veteran WordPress users know that there are a ton of related post plugins out there, but few of them do a decent job. That’s because most related post plugins rely on searching through your database of posts, finding similar keywords to those used in whatever post is currently being viewed, and serving up those related posts on the fly. This not only makes for pretty poor results (are any of these posts really ever that related?), all of those search queries slow down page load time and put a serious tax on your server’s processor.
As Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine and This Week in Google fame have pointed out, we ought to be taking on the role or curators of content in addition to our role as creators of content. So, let’s ditch the dumb relationships generated by processor hogs in favor of smart relationships generated by humans, namely us.
Enter Microkid’s Related Posts, an ingenious plugin from an anonymous, self-described “Amsterdam based independent new media concept developer.” This plugin allows you to search for related posts within WordPress’s post authoring page using an AJAX-powered search utility. Not only is this quick, easy, and awesome-looking, but it also means that the relationship between posts is created once and costs the author time, not the readers.
So far, this is all pretty awesome, but the most impressive part of this plugin is the reciprocal relationship established between the posts you choose as related. As the plugin’s author says:
The relationship created works reciprocal, which means that if post A is added as related to post B, post B is automatically added as related to post A as well
That’s a really killer feature considering the alternative—open a half dozen posts and pointing them at all one another.
This plugin is a huge time saver, it creates better related post links than the alternatives (because you do the work, not a machine), and it doesn’t bog down WordPress with yet another query-happy plugin.
I’ll leave you with a screenshot of that beautiful AJAX search:
Cord is the director of new media at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He has been a web developer for over a decade, working with non-profits to rein in their web development costs and grow their online audiences through simple best practices.
