7 WordPress plugins to show recommended content on your site
Showcasing additional content on your website is a great way to interact with your audience and turn first-time visitors into loyal ones. In other words, if you aren’t already, you need to take advantage of having someone’s attention for a brief moment in time and then capitalize on it. There are many ways you can do this, but today we’re going to focus on 7 plugins for WordPress that let you recommend additional content to your audience to further captivate them.
Implementing a recommended posts section is a really good way to engage your online readers and increase the number of page views generated on your site. How do I know this? Its been proven, but perhaps more importantly, if you think about your content from a reader’s perspective, you’ll come to the following conclusions:
- Readers always want updated content.
- Visitors often check out different blog sections to learn more.
- Customers read and share content if it strikes a cord with them and/or is about a trending topic.
- Highlighting other [related] content will keep your audience further engaged and reduce bounce rates.
Thankfully, if you use WordPress to power your site, as is the case with millions of websites on the web, there are several excellent WordPress plugins for showing recommended content on your site. Here are 7 of the most popular WordPress plugins that do just that.
WordPress Popular Posts is a feature-rich plugin that allows you to insert great recommendations at the end of your content. It’s one the oldest and most advanced of these types of plugins with more than 200,000 installs.
- Lets you manage & set the number of posts along with title for the widget.
- You can display trending posts based on the number of views and comments.
- This plugin enables you to set the desired timeframe while selecting the older posts that are popular and visible as recommendations.
- The plugin offers various customization options.
The features of the Top 10 plugin allow you to highlight the best 10 posts on a regular basis. With the Top 10 plugin, you can :
- Track the number of page views on your blog and display the most popular ones as recommendations.
- You can exclude certain categories and posts from appearing in the top posts list.
- Allows you to use custom CSS to style the recommendations.
If you have security concerns in your mind, go for Jetpack as its developed by Automattic, the company who created WordPress and it is also in the list of the best WordPress plugins. Jetpack also offers various other features in addition to content recommendations, including anti-spam features, tools to speed up your site, stats for your website, and more.
More than 80,000 websites are currently using WP Tab Widget to make implementing content selection tabs easier. It’s an easy-to-use plugin that also provides powerful CSS customization to match your desired theme. This plugin is great if you want to add recommended content to your sidebar as it offers a number of post and view options.
Similar to WP Tab Widget, Popular Widget offers flexibility to put the most visited content as well as the most commented posts in a single widget. Users can easily switch between the various tabs such as recent content, most popular, and most commented. You can also configure the number of posts you want to display on a particular tab.
Add some style to your recommended content widget with Stylish Popular Posts. This plugin offers attractive thumbnail views and a variety of options to style/decorate your recommended content without having to know CSS.
As you might have guessed based on the plugin’s name, Most and Least Read Posts lets you showcase both the most viewed/read articles as well as the least. The plugin also provides a feature to show how many times a particular post has been read inside existing post content. For example:
The number of hits can be shown inside the post content, with:
- a custom phrase, e.g. “This post has already been read XX times!”
- a custom position (above the post, below the post, both)
- a custom CSS style
Conclusion
So which should you use? In the end that’s up to you. I’d definitely recommend try each until you find one or two that fit your needs.