Hi Stef,
Thank you for the follow-up and for doing some testing on your end. I think I’ve hit the end of the line on this, at least for now. The only option Showit can give me is to upgrade to try to upgrade to their “advanced blog” (which is a regular hosted WordPress installation rather than Multisite), but with no guarantee that this would fix the problem.
Just out of curiosity, do you have the ability to repeat your test on a Multisite installation?
Hi @michaelcaswell,
Thanks again for sticking with us through all of this — and for sharing such a clear explanation of what you’re seeing. Your work is stunning, and I can completely understand how having consistent post titles is a natural part of your portfolio, especially when you shoot at the same venue multiple times.
From everything you’ve shared and from what we’ve been able to test on our side, it looks like this display glitch in Related Posts is being triggered by a few overlapping factors:
- Jetpack’s connection to your site is blocked due to the
xmlrpc.php restriction, which limits our ability to fully check or adjust the way Related Posts behaves on your site.
- Your site is hosted on a multisite setup, where Jetpack does have some known limitations. While we can’t confirm this affects Related Posts specifically, it’s possible the multisite environment plays a role.
- And finally, the Secondary Title plugin seems to be involved in how the post titles are rendered — even though Related Posts doesn’t normally use secondary titles, it appears to misattribute them when there are duplicate post titles.
Since the core issue only shows up when two posts have the exact same title, the most reliable workaround for now would be to adjust your post titles slightly to make each one unique. I know that’s not ideal — especially with how consistent and clear your naming convention is — but even small tweaks (like adding the couple’s name or a venue detail) should help prevent this bug from appearing.
We’ve tested this on a clean Jetpack setup and weren’t able to reproduce it, so at this point it seems tied to your specific setup — and unfortunately, due to the blocked connection and third-party plugins involved, there’s a limit to what we can do from our end.
If you’d ever have a chance to recreate this issue on a different WordPress install (even a temporary one with Jetpack properly connected), we’d be happy to investigate further or even escalate it as a potential bug.
In the meantime, if you’d like help brainstorming subtle title variations that stay true to your branding, I’d be happy to lend a hand. You could also try out our AI-powered title suggestion tool here:
https://jetpack.com/support/improve-your-post-titles-with-ai-assistant/
Thanks again for your patience and for being so detailed throughout this. Let us know if there’s anything else we can do.
All the best,
Alin
Thanks, I appreciate you looking into it! I think I’ll just try really hard to come up with small variations in title naming… including the couple’s names would be the simplest solution, but that defeats the purpose of using the secondary title for their names (I like the aesthetics of having their names smaller, above the main title).
Showit does offer an “advanced blog” package that is not a multisite installation, and I might someday upgrade to that. If I do, I will revisit this issue.
Update, I just stumbled onto a fix. In the settings for Secondary Title plugin, there’s an option for “Only show in main post” (with the description stating “only displays the secondary title if the post is a main post and not within a widget etc.”). Turning that setting ON eliminated the errant secondary title being appended to related posts with an identical title.
Hi @michaelcaswell,
Thanks for the update — and great catch on that Secondary Title setting! Turning on “Only show in main post” is a smart fix, and I’m glad it solved the issue with Related Posts picking up the secondary title.
It also makes sense that you’re balancing aesthetics with functionality — using the couple’s names as a smaller heading is a really nice touch.
If you do ever upgrade to Showit’s advanced blog package and want to revisit this setup, feel free to reach back out. I’d be happy to take another look with you.
Appreciate you sharing the solution — it could be helpful for others too!
That said, I’m going to mark this thread as resolved.
Best!
