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    Home » News & Updates

    Modern Previous + Next

    Published: Mar 16, 2020 · Modified: Oct 17, 2022 by Skylar · 8 Comments

    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.

    before: unrelated posts, chosen chronologically
    after: visually appealing, related recipes

    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:

    setting to enable the modern previous + next

    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.

    More

    • Feast Plus vs. Feast Plugin
    • Modified dates
    • Buttons
    • GA4

    Reader Interactions

    Comments

    1. Katie says

      July 11, 2022 at 6:46 pm

      Is there a way to remove "recipes"? I use feast, but do not have a recipe website, I am a craft tutorial website. So the header for this section says "More Craft Recipes"

      Reply
      • Iuliana Sbirnea says

        July 12, 2022 at 12:23 am

        How can we translate that "more" into other languages?

        Reply
    2. Luci says

      July 13, 2022 at 4:16 pm

      Is there a way to edit the "more [category]" text? For example to say, "More [category] posts" or "more [category] content?

      Love this update!

      Reply
    3. alicia gonzalez says

      September 08, 2022 at 11:38 am

      Hi, I'm getting this message under the heading: Notice: Undefined offset: 0 in /home4/bitesint/public_html/wp-includes/capabilities.php on line 149

      How could I solve this??

      Thanks so much!

      Reply
    4. Kathleen says

      September 23, 2022 at 11:29 pm

      Skylar,
      Thanks for this update - I've been doing a manual version of this for a while now, so the auto feature is great!
      I ended up turning it off, however, because currently I tend to point people towards other recipes featuring the same ingredient, rather than a recipe from the same category. That might change as my categories grow - right now they're limited, so I prefer to hand pick for better relevance.
      Someday I'll have very specific categories, and this will be a welcome improvement to switch back on - it does take some extra time.
      Appreciate all the continuous improvement of Feast!
      Kathleen

      Reply
      • Skylar says

        September 24, 2022 at 11:26 am

        Thanks for the kind words Kathleen 🙂

        The Modern Prev+Next selects the posts based on (1) Yoast primary category and (2) date being prior to the current post date.

        The only way it would displaying recipes based on ingredients is if your site was set up using ingredients as primary categories (not recommended) or you had some other plugin/filter altering queries.

        Reply
    5. Marco says

      January 12, 2023 at 7:14 am

      Hi Skylar, thanks so much for this feature, it is very useful and saves so much time. The only change I would like to make is to move it above the recipe card and not at the bottom of the post like it is now. Is there an easy way to achieve this?

      Reply
      • Skylar says

        January 12, 2023 at 8:48 am

        Yes! Just insert an FSRI block and use the category or ingredients field to link to related recipes: https://feastdesignco.com/fsri-block/#related-posts

        Reply

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