YARPP Alternative: Ariadne vs Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

YARPP, short for Yet Another Related Posts Plugin, has been around since 2008 and still runs on more than 100,000 WordPress sites. It is also falling behind. If you are looking for a YARPP alternative, this page compares it with Ariadne Related Posts, the plugin we build, and shows how to switch without losing your related posts.

Is YARPP still maintained?

YARPP is run by Shareaholic, which owns yarpp.com and is listed as a contributor on its WordPress.org page. Its last update was version 5.30.11, released on 11 November 2024. Its WordPress.org page says it was tested up to WordPress 6.7, and it now shows a warning that the plugin “hasn’t been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress”. WordPress has since shipped 6.8, 6.9, 7.0 and 7.1.

That does not mean YARPP stops working. Plenty of sites still run it, and its 96/100 rating from more than 1,100 reviews was earned over many years. It does mean nobody has checked it against those releases. One open thread on its support forum, from June 2026, reports that YARPP broke the visual revisions screen on WordPress 7.0, and it had no reply when we checked in October 2026. WordPress.org’s own count shows one new support thread in the previous two months, with none resolved. There is no paid version to fund fixes either. The YARPP Pro service was discontinued in 2017.

How YARPP and Ariadne decide what is related

Both plugins look at what posts have in common, and both let you change how much each signal counts. In their free versions, both do all the matching on your own server.

YARPP compares titles, post bodies, categories and tags. For each one you choose whether to ignore it, consider it, or give it extra weight. Posts then need to pass a “match threshold” score to show up. Its own FAQ says that when no related posts appear, the threshold is usually set too high, and suggests lowering it to about 1 and raising it step by step. Getting that number right takes some trial and error, and at least one user on its forum in 2026 still reported loosely related results after tuning it. To do its matching, YARPP adds full-text indexes to your wp_posts table and keeps scores in its own yarpp_related_cache table.

Ariadne scores each post against the others using four signals: shared tags, shared categories, overlap between title words, and full-text similarity of the whole post. You set a weight for each one. Out of the box, tags count most. There is no threshold to tune. Each post simply shows its closest matches. Ariadne works out every list in the background when you save a post, so a page view is just a read of a stored list, even on cached or busy sites. On the Pro plans you can add AI matching, which looks at what a post is about rather than the words it shares.

What you can control

YARPP has strong developer tools. You can display related posts automatically, with a block, the [yarpp] shortcode, a widget, PHP functions or its REST API, and you can write your own PHP display templates. It also works with custom post types, WooCommerce and bbPress.

What YARPP does not let you do is pick posts by hand. Its FAQ says choosing related posts manually is outside the plugin’s scope. If the algorithm misses an obvious match, you cannot add it.

Ariadne covers the same placements: automatic under your content, a block, the [ariadne_related] shortcode or a widget, all free. Each post’s edit screen shows its related list and the score behind every match, so you can see why a post was picked. The free version also adds “Up next”, a link to one more article once a reader is about 60% of the way through. On Pro you can pin or exclude specific posts, mark a cornerstone post to show up across the site, and fully restyle the list. Pro+ adds related-post boxes placed partway through long articles. The wider comparison of related posts plugins covers more options if you want to look beyond these two.

How to switch from YARPP to Ariadne

1. Install Ariadne Related Posts from WordPress.org and activate it, with YARPP still running.
2. Let Ariadne build its lists. The Dashboard shows its progress. On most sites this runs on its own in the background.
3. Open a few posts and compare the two lists side by side. Each post’s Ariadne panel shows the scores, which makes it easy to spot a weak match and adjust the weights.
4. Search your content for the [yarpp] shortcode or the YARPP block, and replace them with [ariadne_related] or the Ariadne block. If your theme calls yarpp_related() in a template file, remove that call.
5. Turn off YARPP’s automatic display, check a few posts, then deactivate YARPP.
6. If you are done with YARPP for good, delete it from the Plugins screen, then check that its yarpp_related_cache table and its full-text indexes on wp_posts are gone. Remove them by hand, or ask your host, if they remain.

Ariadne needs WordPress 6.0 and PHP 7.4 or newer. If your site still runs an older PHP version, that is worth fixing first anyway.