Hand-picked related articles in WordPress
When a visitor reads an article she landed to, it’s always good to offer some similar content for further reading. When someone comes to a web site from an external source, say search engine — that usually means she searched for something particular. In that case, if the article is not exactly what she was looking for, it’s smart to offer an alternative on the same web page.
We recently made an internal study about difference between hand-picked vs. automatic related articles, and as you can already guess — when an article has a hand-picked related content, there’s a greater chance that the visitor will stay, instead of bouncing off to the next Google search result.
This function works with Custom Fields in WordPress, i.e. you’d create Custom Field with “hand_picked_article” for meta name and put the post ID of the content you wan’t to display as a meta value. For more related articles simply add more Custom Fields with the same meta name.
If there’s no hand picked articles, the function will return tag or category related list.
