Alternatives to nRelate Plugin for Related Posts

I know a lot of you use the nRelate plugin for related posts but they have just announced that they are going to discontinue this. This is a real bummer as I really like the options that this plugin allows and the ability to edit the CSS to fit my blogs.

I have been looking at alternatives and have found a few below:

My favourite new plugin Contextly – Free and Paid

Contextly is available for WordPress blogs as a plugin. This one is most similar to nRelate and is the best alternative I have found so far. Just install it, get the API and you are done. The best thing is that all the processes are not done on your server so it doesn’t hog up your resources. It will not slow down your site.

You can customise your Contextly feeds by adding two RSS feeds to the “Interesting” and “Custom” sections. You can also add in-post sidebars manually or automatically.

Another useful perk is that you can get daily or weekly emails that show you detailed stats per post and identifies which post got the most traffic. I think this is quite a nice addition service.

This one is free up to 10,00 uniques a month. I believe you pay for the premium service if your traffic exceeds this.

Link Within – Free

Link Within is a service that I used to use a while back before I found these other ones. You can use this on Blogger, Wordpres, Typepad and other blogs too. This is easy to install with just a code from their website. The issue with this one is that there are no choices for settings, to exclude categories, to change layout and designs. It is the most basic but has its limitations.

Engageya – Free

This works on Blogger, WordPress and has a JavaScript option for other platforms. You need to sign up for an account to get the widget.

Shareaholic – Free

I found out that they had this option recently when they automatically turned it on when I updated the plugin. I used this for the Sexy Bookmarks option but I really don’t like it when they force new options on you without warning. I have turned this option off now.

There are some choices in the settings section but I didn’t spend a lot of time testing them out.

Other WordPress Plugins

There’s a number of Related Posts plugins for WordPress such as

• CP Related Posts
• Jetpack Related Posts
• Sharaholic
• Contextly Related Links
• Related Posts
• YARPP
• Contextual Related Posts  
• Related Posts for WordPress