Related blog posts in Magento 2 are the best way to encourage your website visitors to read more and stay on your website longer.
However, if you have a lot of blog posts, it might be tiring and really time-consuming to add the related blog posts to each article you have. That is why in our Magento 2 Blog extension there is the auto-related blog posts option.
Note: you can configure auto-related posts only if you use Blog Plus or Blog Extra.
To configure auto-related blog posts in Magento 2 follow these steps:
1. Go to Admin Panel > Stores > Configuration > Magefan Extensions > Blog > Post Page (Post View) and find the Related Posts section.
2. Enabled the Display Related Posts option.
3. Select the related posts Template: Use System Settings or Modern - Blog Extra.
4. Enable Auto Related Related Posts (Blog+) in the corresponding field.
The algorithm of post-auto-generation is based on post content and titles. This means the extension finds similar words in your blog and uses them to generate related posts.
5. Enter words you don't want to be used for related posts generation in the Black Words For Auto Related field. You don't need to enter one-letter words e.g. (I, 1, 2) since the extension already skips such words.
Since related posts are generated automatically by cron you have to make sure that cron is enabled on your Magento 2 instance.
You can check the related posts section on the storefront sometime after you save configurations:
If some unrelated articles are generated and you want to remove them, just go to the blog post editing page and delete them from related.
Note: if you have added some related posts manually and then automatically generated the others, articles added manually will have more priority.
Auto-related blog posts always save you a lot of time since you don't have to assign them manually for each blog post. However, the auto-related posts option is not the only feature of Blog Plus and Extra. Check out the other advantages of using these blog editions.