Modern Previous + Next

This tutorial features the Feast Plugin, which enhances and extends your theme to improve SEO, pagespeed, accessibility and user experience.

The previous + next feature built into the themes was designed for a time when blogs were blogs - chronological lists of posts.

But this is 2022, and blogs are dead. Modern "food blogs" require proper site structure and content categorization.

People search for specific topics (recipes), and expect your linked content to be related.

The Modern Previous + Next replaces the 2 date-based text links at the bottom of posts, with 4 image+text links within the same parent category.

This is done to:

• improve user experience by providing more relevant content to pick from
• boost click through rates to relevant posts, earning more ad revenue
• better internally link to relevant content for SEO

Modern recipe sites need to be designed to display topically related content, not just what you happened to make the previous week, or next week.

If I land on your site for a quinoa powerbowl, I want other powerbowl recipes.

What I don't want is the german chocolate cake recipe you made the week before, or a crantini recipe you made the week after. These just aren't relevant to what I was looking for.

Jump to:

• Activate
• How posts are chosen
• Customizing the heading
• Troubleshooting

Activate

Simply enable this in the Feast Plugin to activate it:

How posts are chosen

If Yoast is enabled and the primary category is set for that post, it uses the primary category to display posts. This is the best practice.

If a primary category hasn't been set, this will simply get the first selected category on the "edit post" page. Not the best option, but better than chronologically chosen.

Note: in order to keep links persistent (eg. they don't change when the page is reloaded) and maintain variety we select the posts published within that category before the current one, chronologically.

This ensures that all posts get linked to, back to the oldest post in the category.

Customizing the heading

You can customize the heading under the "Post Settings" section of the Feast Plugin:

You can also dynamically insert the category fields with the words "title" and "name":

• The word "title" will be replaced with the "Archive Title" field
• The word "name" will be replaced with the category "Name" field

Troubleshooting

Irregular image sizes

By default, we use the default featured image size and fall back to the "medium" image thumbnail, which doesn't crop the image to a specific ratio. To resolve this, re-upload the featured images at our recommended size: 1200x1200 square.

Alternatively, you can select a thumbnail size that forces cropping such as:

• feast-square-1x1-360x360
• feast-landscape-4x3-360x270
• feast-portrait-3x4-360x480

We recommend either a square or landscape (horizontal) thumbnail that's at least 360px wide.

No image showing

This is likely because your post does not have a featured image.

Go to the post, and set the featured image.

Why is it showing unrelated recipes

This is usually caused by having a general "recipes" category (or "uncategorized") and either having that set as the Yoast Primary Category in the post editor, or not having a primary category set at all.

To solve this, assign the post to the best parent category.