YARPP—Yet Another Related Posts Plugin—Now Supported On WP Engine

WP Engine is thrilled to announce that after outstanding performance optimizations to the YARPP—Yet Another Related Posts Plugin, it has officially been removed from our disallowed plugins list and is now available for use by all WP Engine customers.

Plugins remain one of WordPress’ most widely-used features, and for good reason. With nearly 60,000 free plugins to choose from in the WordPress plugin repository alone, plugins make it possible for you to extend your WordPress site with just about any type of functionality imaginable. 

YARPP is a great example of this extended functionality, offering users a highly customizable, performant, and feature-rich framework for improving customer engagement and data collection abilities. 

Using a customizable algorithm, the plugin scans post titles, content, tags, categories, and custom taxonomies to find the most relevant, related content across your site, making it readily available to your visitors.

The plugin is widely used and extremely popular, with hundreds of five-star reviews on WordPress.org, and it’s seeing an uptick in downloads as an increasing number of site owners look to the plugin as a great way to boost engagement, time on site, and additional SEO metrics. 

As noted above, YARPP is also now fully available to use with WP Engine customer sites, as our list of disallowed plugins was recently updated to reflect impressive optimizations the YARPP team has made to the plugin. 

While we encourage customers to tap into the expansive library of WordPress plugins, WP Engine also maintains a list of plugins that are disallowed on our platform to better ensure the security and overall performance of our customers’ sites—and to prevent customers from installing plugins that may be harmful to performance or might conflict with our platform optimizations.

Removing YARPP From the Disallowed List

YARPP was initially launched in 2007, and after many years of use, the plugin was briefly delisted from the WordPress repository in 2019 due to an issue with email addresses. 

That issue was soon resolved with YARPP version 4.5, which was released after the plugin was purchased by Jay Meattle and a team of dedicated developers with deep expertise in content recommendations and 10+ years of experience developing popular plugins used by over 100,000 websites.  

In addition to being delisted from the plugin repository at that time, YARPP was also included on the list of disallowed plugins for WP Engine customer sites due to the plugin’s previous, resource-heavy configurations.

Outside of YARPP, Meattle and his team have been long-time WP Engine partners through their work managing and maintaining Shareaholic, a WP Engine-recommended solution that provides social share buttons, related posts, and analytics functionality alongside a suite of advanced audience growth and engagement tools.

To bring YARRP up to speed, and ensure it was removed from WP Engine’s disallowed list, Meattle and his team made numerous improvements to documentation and support as well as major investments in the plugin’s features, code modernization, and performance capabilities, ensuring it would benefit a wider audience. 

“While we had focused on getting YARPP relisted on WordPress.org as the first order of business, ensuring WP Engine users could also benefit from the plugin was another top priority,” Meattle said. 

Optimizing for Performance and Efficiency 

While earlier versions of the plugin relied on more database-intensive processes that could have impacted site performance, Meattle and his team focused on updating those processes as well, ultimately creating a new, advanced inbuilt caching system to provide plugin users with a more scalable experience.  

With that work complete, Meattle notified WP Engine, and security and dev teams on the WP Engine side reviewed documentation and performed necessary testing to ensure optimal compatibility before clearing the plugin for customer use.

“Our laser-focus on fixing YARPP’s resource-intensive processes has resulted in more efficient and faster database queries—according to our own tests and WP Engine’s tests of the plugin,” Meattle said.

“Long gone are the days when YARPP was a resource-heavy plugin. Today, YARPP works well on large sites, and it’s become even more effective at surfacing relevant results.”

In addition to working on the plugin itself, Meattle and his team provide outstanding, ongoing user support, which includes deep experience serving the needs of enterprises.

Now that YARPP has been officially removed from the disallowed list, existing YARPP users can easily migrate to WP Engine without losing access to the plugin or their preferred settings. And, current WP Engine customers can download the plugin and start using it today! Check out the section below to get started.

Start Using YARPP Today

Ready to take YARPP for a spin? You can download and install the plugin right now for a closer look at all the great features this plugin includes. Use this helpful guide for a step-by-step walkthrough of plugin installation.

Once YARPP is installed and running on your site, you can configure the plugin to match your preferences. Here are a few of the most popular options YARPP makes available: 

• The ability to design your own custom YARPP templates to perfectly match your site’s design and style—designers love this feature!
• Support for unlimited configurations, for example, one for your WooCommerce store and another for your blog.
• Customizations you can use to affect the look and feel of your related posts, as well as the algorithm that pulls content for each section of your site.
• The ability to place related content anywhere, including the sidebar.
• REST API and block support for ultimate flexibility.
• Complete multilingual support. YARPP works seamlessly with all languages.

With the plugin activated and customized with your specifications, sit back and watch your sessions and pageviews grow!

Embrace the Power of Plugins 

WP Engine helps you embrace the power of plugins with tools and support geared specifically for plugin users. 

We built Smart Plugin Manager to make it easier for you to enjoy more of the plugin ecosystem by removing the time-consuming work of keeping plugins up to date while ensuring your (or your clients’) sites never break.

Find out more about the wide ecosystem of WordPress plugins here, and speak to a specialist to find out how you can put plugins to use on your WordPress site!