There are a lot of little details that go into creating a WordPress website. You want to be sure that you’re displaying the right content, including related posts, responses, and comments, so that your website can become a place where your followers get to know you and engage with a wider community.
There are times, however, when sharing too much information can be detrimental to your site goals and its user experience, or UX. By using Jetpack’s Related Posts feature, you can ensure that you’re showing visitors high-value items that attract — and not distract — a growing following.
Today, we’ll teach you how to manage your WordPress website’s related content with Jetpack, and why it’s important to show it in the first place.
Controlling page load times with Related Posts
Your site visitors don’t want to stare at a loading screen on their devices while they wait for your site to load. The more site content that needs to load, the more patient site visitors will need to be in order to view pages they really want to see. It won’t be long before they leave your site altogether.
According to Google, 53 percent of site visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than three seconds to load. If your website doesn’t load within that time frame, visitors might navigate to another site for answers to their questions, entertainment purposes, or to purchase products and services.
Additionally, SEO experts at Search Engine Land report that Google’s algorithm factors in page speed on mobile devices as part of its search engine ranking process. This means that poor page load times can equate to low search rankings. Additionally, if people visit your page and then click away within a few seconds (an inevitable result if visitors are closing your page due to slow load times), you’ll find your search ranking dipping even more. This means that slow load times can eventually prevent visitors from seeing your content altogether.
Keeping your load times short is critical for your site success, and failing to do so can be incredibly detrimental. That’s why Jetpack offloads related post generation to WordPress.com servers so that your website doesn’t have to do the heavy lifting. This is one of the advantages that Jetpack has over competing plugins that add functionality to your site at the cost of speed.
How Related Posts reduces distractions
Related Posts helps you cut down on potential distractions by allowing you to choose the display settings for your relevant content, like whether or not to include their post thumbnails.
More importantly, if there are no relevant posts for a specific piece of content, Related Posts won’t display any recommendations, rather than showing posts that are irrelevant or just a distraction to visitors.
How removing Related Posts could improve UX
Related Posts can aid in encouraging readers to take a specific action, and prevent them from navigating away from your site. But in contrast, sometimes removing Related Posts from a specific article or section of your website can help to guide their actions and even improve your user experience.
For example, if you want a reader to subscribe to your newsletter after finishing an article, you might place a subscription button at the end of a particular article, instead of recommending that they read several other related posts. You can apply this to individual posts by using the Related Posts filters and determining where and when relevant posts should not appear.
Improve your site with relevant content recommendations
From decreasing load times to screening the content that visitors see on your page, controlling comments and related posts can have a significant impact on your website. With Related Posts implemented, you can take precise control over the content that complements each of your posts, or let Jetpack take care of it for you.
As a result, you’ll improve your load times, boost your user experience, retain more visitors, and rank better in search engines.
What kind of website do you manage, and how do you use (or plan to use) Jetpack’s Related Posts? Share your insights with others in the comments below.
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I need some clarity here, as per the article Jetpack processes the generation of related posts instead of my own website, is that correct? Then how is that process is faster than my website itself creating these related posts?
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Jetpack does indeed index all your posts. It then looks at the posts’s titles, content, tags, categories, and compares all the words in each post with the others on your site to find the posts that are the most related. Jetpack does this in the WordPress.com Cloud, without using your site’s resources. That process is quite resource-intensive, and that’s consequently not something you would be able to do on a shared hosting platform.
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Thanks Jeremy for the wonderful explanation, that clarifies my doubts.. Thank you very much!
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