Contextual Related Posts vs Widgets Control

Contextual Related Posts is a powerful WordPress plugin that displays fast, intelligent related posts to keep users on your site longer. Improve SEO, increase pageviews, and lower bounce rates — no setup needed. Key features Activate and Forget: Activate the plugin. Contextual Related Posts automatically displays related posts on your site and in your feed after the content. There is no need to edit any template files. Custom Control with Manual Install: Want placement control? You have multiple options available: Gutenberg / Block Editor support: You can easily add a “Related Posts [CRP]” block to any post or page with its options and settings. Widgets: Add related posts to any widgetized theme area, such as the sidebar or footer. You can configure the widget options to suit your needs. Shortcode: Use [crp] to display the related posts anywhere within the post content. REST API: Fetch related posts for any post ID using contextual-related-posts/v1/posts/ /. You can also use query parameters to filter or sort the results. The algorithm: Find related posts based on the current post’s title and/or content. You can also find posts by tags, categories and selected custom fields. Caching: Related posts output is automatically cached as visitors browse through your site, reducing the load on your server and improving performance. View Demo Contextual Related Posts uses an intelligent algorithm that analyzes your post’s title and/or content to find the most related ones. This way, you can show your visitors more awesome content and keep them on your site longer. With Contextual Related Posts, you can quickly boost your site’s traffic, reduce bounce rates, and refresh old entries. It’s fast, flexible, and easy to use. Try it today and see the difference for yourself! Additional features include: Exclusions: Exclude posts from specific categories or tags from being displayed in the related posts list. Custom post types: The related posts list supports posts, pages, attachments, or any other custom post type on your site. Thumbnail support: Display thumbnails or not! Styles: The output of the related posts list is wrapped in CSS classes that allow you to style it easily using custom CSS code. Customizable output: Display post excerpts in the related posts list. Customize the HTML tags and attributes used to display the output. Extendable code: Many filters and actions allow developers to easily add features, modify outputs, or integrate with other plugins. MySQL FULLTEXT indices On activation, the plugin creates three MySQL FULLTEXT indices (or indexes), which are leveraged to find the related posts. Learn more about how the algorithm works. If you’re running a multisite installation, an index is created for each blog upon activation. These indices occupy space in your MySQL database but are essential for running the plugin. Two options on the settings page allow you to remove these indices when deactivating or deleting the plugin. The latter is true by default. 💼 Features Exclusive to CRP Pro CRP Pro supercharges your related posts with advanced customization, better performance, and powerful content strategy tools. 🚀 Performance Enhancements Efficient Content Storage and Indexing: Speed up your site with optimized custom tables and efficient database indices for lightning-fast queries. Cache Setting: Fine-tune your performance with configurable cache times from 1 hour to 1 year. Server Load Threshold: Prevent CRP from running queries when the database is under heavy load. Bot Protection: Skip CRP processing for known bots and crawlers using an extensible signature list, saving server resources. 🎯 Smarter Content Matching Advanced Algorithm: Control exactly how relevant content is found by adjusting weights for title, content, and excerpt. Taxonomy Weight System: Refine your matches with precise taxonomy weighting for perfect content relationships. 🛒 WooCommerce Integration Related Products for WooCommerce: Seamlessly integrate with WooCommerce to show related products. Product Matching & Filtering: Index SKUs and attributes, filter by stock status, and use category-based recommendations with native WooCommerce styling. Display Customization: Toggle prices, ratings, and choose to replace or complement WooCommerce’s related products. 📖 WooCommerce Related Products Documentation WP-CLI Support Contextual Related Posts Pro includes comprehensive WP-CLI commands for advanced management and automation. Perfect for developers, agencies, and site administrators who need powerful command-line tools. Key WP-CLI Features: Database Management: Migrate post meta, check index status, and manage database operations Cache Control: Clear, warm, enable/disable cache with multisite support Custom Table Operations: Sync content and manage FULLTEXT indexes for optimal performance Content Processing: Reprocess posts and manage related content in bulk Multisite Ready: All commands support --network flag for multisite installations 📖 Complete CLI Documentation 🎨 Advanced Design & Display Options Block Editor Integration: Create beautiful layouts with the Query Loop Block and ready-to-use block patterns including Grid, Image with Title, and more. Extra Shortcode Parameters: Unlock additional customization options for complete control over your related posts display. 📊 Analytics & Content Strategy Tools Tracking Parameters: Measure content performance with automatic UTM tracking for all related post clicks. Cornerstone Posts: Guide visitors to your most important content by featuring key articles in your related posts lists. Additional Metabox Settings: Control related content at the individual post level for perfect content relationships. GDPR Contextual Related Posts doesn’t collect personal data or send information to external services — making it GDPR-friendly by default. ⚠️ You’re responsible for ensuring your site’s overall GDPR compliance. Donations Love Contextual Related Posts? Help keep it alive! You can donate or upgrade to CRP Pro — both help support development and support. Contribute Contextual Related Posts is also available on Github. So, if you’ve got some cool feature you’d like to implement into the plugin or a bug you’ve been able to fix, consider forking the project and sending me a pull request. Bug reports are welcomed on Github. Please note Github is not a support forum, and issues that aren’t suitably qualified as bugs will be closed. Translations Contextual Related Posts is available for translation directly on WordPress.org. Check out the official Translator Handbook to contribute. Other Plugins by WebberZone Contextual Related Posts is one of the many plugins developed by WebberZone. Check out our other plugins: Top 10 – Track daily and total visits to your blog posts and display the popular and trending posts WebberZone Snippetz – The ultimate snippet manager for WordPress to create and manage custom HTML, CSS or JS code snippets Knowledge Base – Create a knowledge base or FAQ section on your WordPress site Better Search – Enhance the default WordPress search with contextual results sorted by relevance Auto-Close – Automatically close comments, pingbacks and trackbacks and manage revisions Popular Authors – Display popular authors in your WordPress widget Followed Posts – Show a list of related posts based on what your users have read WebberZone Link Warnings – Add accessible warnings for external links and target=”_blank” links

Widgets Control is a toolbox that features visibility management for all widgets, sidebars, sections of content and content blocks. It allows to show widgets and sidebars based on conditions – you can choose to show them only on certain pages or exclude them from being displayed. Sections of content can also be restricted by using this plugin’s [widgets_control] shortcode. You can also define new WYSIWYG Content Blocks that can be used in widgets, sidebars and with shortcodes. For each widget and sidebar, you can decide where it should be displayed: show it on all pages show it on some pages show it on all except some pages … you can target small, medium or large screens for mobile, tablet and desktop users. To include or exclude pages, the plugin allows you to indicate page ids, titles or slugs and tokens that identify the front page, categories, tags, etc. In addition to page ids, titles and slugs, these tokens can be used to determine where a widget should or should not be displayed: [home] [front] [single] [page] [category] ... On sites using WPML, widgets can be shown conditionally based on the language viewed. The [widgets_control] shortcode is used to embed content and show it conditionally similar to the visibility options used for widgets and sidebars. For example, [widgets_control conditions="{archive}"]This text is shown only when the content is displayed on an archive page.[/widgets_control]. Widgets Control also provides flexible WYSIWYG Content Blocks and a proper widget that can be used to place them in sidebars, the [widgets_control_content] shortcode to embed freely created blocks anywhere on your pages and API functions that allow to include these blocks in PHP templates of your theme. For even more flexible control, use Widgets Control Pro which provides freely definable additional sidebars. Use display conditions to show or hide content on devices with small, medium or large displays, useful to adapt the display to mobile, tablet and desktop viewers. See the documentation for more details. Widgets Control works with virtually any widget. It is compatible with lots of plugins, among these it has been tested with: Groups Affiliates Decent Comments WooCommerce WooCommerce Product Search Search Live Documentation Events Manager BuddyPress bbPress Ninja Forms Gravity Forms Jetpack WPML NextGEN Gallery Image Widget MailChimp for WordPress The Events Calendar MailPoet Newsletters Elementor Widgets Control Pro Our Widgets Control Pro provides additional features: Conditions based on the viewed post type. For example, show a widget only on posts with [type:post] or only on product pages with [type:product] Show or hide widgets on full page hierarchies, where conditions are based on a parent page and all its child pages: some-page/* Show or hide widgets based on user roles. For example, show a widget to subscribers and customers only: [role:subscriber,customer] Show or hide widgets based on a user’s group membership with Groups. For example, show a widget only to registered users with [group:Registered] or show a widget only to users in a Premium group using [group:Premium] Show or hide widgets for archive pages of a specific post type. For example, [archive:product] can be used to show widgets for the WooCommerce shop page and product archives only. Allows to specify exclusions. For example, to show a widget only on pages, but exclude it from being shown on one or more specific pages. Provides additional sidebar features that allow to define any number of custom sidebars, flexible placement based on common locations, including above and below content, the comment form, menus and other sidebars, the [widgets_control_sidebar] shortcode to embed them in content on your pages and API functions to use them in your theme’s templates. Feedback Feedback is welcome! If you need help, have problems, want to leave feedback or want to provide constructive criticism, please do so here at the Widgets Control plugin page. Please try to solve problems there before you rate this plugin or say it doesn’t work. There goes a lot of work into providing you with quality plugins! Please help with your feedback and we’re also grateful if you help spread the word about this plugin. Thanks! Twitter Follow @itthinx on Twitter for updates on this and other plugins.