5 Best WordPress Q&A Plugins
Creating a questions and answers platform is a great way of engaging with your audience and reaching out to them. It’s important to let users voice their concerns and provide them with appropriate answers, because they’ll recognize your efforts and that you care about them, which will help establish a good relationship with your consumers. And the fewer doubts they have about your brand, the higher the chance of you boosting your sales.
Whenever there’s a functionality WordPress doesn’t support out of the box, queue in plugins. And this time is no different either. We’ve selected five WordPress Q&A plugins that will help you add the Q&A functionality to your website hassle-free:
But before all the plugin-talk, let’s take a look at some major reasons why having a Q&A platform matters.
What Are the Benefits of Q&A Platforms?
For a lot of people who run their own businesses, a Q&A section usually seems superfluous. They already have a spotless website they’ve built using a great WordPress premium theme, so why should they bother with a Q&A platform? What’s in it for them? Well, to be fair, quite a lot. A Q&A platform is a powerful tool that helps you:
Show Customers That You Care
Before someone becomes your client, in the majority of cases they’ll want to learn how committed you are to your users. By allowing people to ask questions and then providing them with answers in a professional and swift manner, you’ll show them you’re dedicated to customer service and that you care about maintaining a great relationship with them.
Reassure Clients
Q&As are incredibly important for instilling trust in your customers. If they see that you regularly address everyone’s concerns and that you use customer’s feedback to improve your services, they’ll feel more confident about doing business with you.
Social-Proof Your Brand
Before we make any online purchase, most of us go through reviews to understand if getting a particular product or service would be a smart decision. Moreover, research has shown that a whopping 97% of consumers read the brand’s responses to reviews, which proves the importance of resolving customers’ concerns and acknowledging their feedback. By creating a Q&A platform, you’ll show potential users that people are interested in what you have to offer, that they’re using your products, and that you’re always there to provide them with the answers whenever they need them. And all will get them closer to pressing the Buy button.
Boost Your SEO
Adding a Q & A section to your website can help with your SEO and increase your traffic. The thing is, Q&A pages are always updated with fresh content. Google has its own freshness algorithm, so, the fresher the content the higher the rankings for your website. Furthermore, if you mark up your Q&A page properly, there’s a chance Google will treat Q&A snippets as rich content and display them in search results (the same thing goes for FAQs on your website). That way, you would increase your visibility in search results, and potentially get higher click-through rates.
And now, let’s take a look at the best plugins you can use to easily create a Q&A platform.
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DW Question & Answer is a highly functional plugin that offers all of its features free of charge.
Once you install and activate it on your WordPress website, look for the Questions menu item to start building your Q&A section. The Add New Question, as its name suggests, is where you can craft questions to your liking. You have the option to set the question status or pin the question to the top of the archive page, as well as to add categories and tags for each question.
From your dashboard, you can also keep an eye on some basic question info, such as how many times a question has been answered and viewed or if someone gave it a vote.
To alter a Q&A section to your requirements, head over to Settings, and make adjustments to questions, answers, votes, etc. For instance, you can activate the option that will ensure all questions are manually approved before they appear on your site, allow anonymous voting, modify permissions depending on the user role, and much more. The plugin also provides the option for public and private commenting.
We especially liked the fact that you can activate multiple add-ons entirely free of charge, such as CAPTCHA, leaderboard (which allows you to display a list of the biggest contributors to your online community), and several others. There’s also a widget pack that now features 5 free widgets, and it lets you display question categories or tags in a sidebar, enable/disable question count, and much more. It’s also worth mentioning that DW Question & Answer supports as many as 22 languages, from Persian to French and beyond – they have it all covered.
Considering you get all of these features free of charge, this plugin is definitely worth checking out. If you wish to extend its functionality, you can opt for a pro version available at $39. You’d get more widgets available, an instant search option, several themes to change the style of your Q&As, user mentions, and more.
Another terrific WordPress Q&A plugin you can download for free is CM Answers. It’s easy to use and packed with all the essential options you need.
You can enable ratings for answers (including the negative “thumbs down” reaction), allow users to rate the best answer, display votes, upload media content to the Q&A section, automatically approve new questions and answers, enable sidebar, show/hide login form, set up email notifications, and much more.
If this is not enough, you can get more features by opting for one of the three premium plans. For instance, all pro packages include BuddyPress integration, the possibility to upload multiple files and to enable subscription to specific categories. There’s also a social share widget, gravatar, and multisite support, and you also have the chance to create question tags and categories, which is something that DW Question & Answer packs for free. Their ultimate plan even includes integration with micropayments and payment support.
SabaiDiscuss is a premium plugin that currently costs $24. The number of features you get for the money is nothing short of impressive. You can use it not only to build a questions and answers platform, but also to create discussion forums, a knowledge base, and a helpdesk portal for your WordPress website.
Just like some of the plugins we mentioned earlier in the article, SabaiDiscuss, too, lets you add tags and categories to questions. Users have the possibility to search through Q&As either via keyword or category, with auto-suggestion active, which allows them to filter the questions they deem most important. Moreover, users earn a reputation depending on how good their posts are, and each user also gets their own profile page.
This plugin also comes with a built-in reporting system that helps users flag posts by other members as spam. You can use it to easily start a members-only forum, create public and password-protected Q&As, decide on user roles, allow guest users to post questions and answers, etc. There’s also a voting system that sends top-rated answers to the top of the page. Furthermore, users can bookmark questions, and heaps more.
Overall, this plugin offers a tremendous value for the money, and you certainly won’t go wrong if you decide to use it for your website.
If you plan to create a simple Q&A section on your web page, then the Ultimate Blocks plugin can be your ally. The Content Toggle block of Ultimate Blocks allows you to create a Q&A section in seconds. It comes with FAQ Schema, which will help to show your FAQs on Google SERPs.
On the Content Toggle block of Ultimate Blocks, you can adjust style, color scheme, border, initial state, the initial state for mobile, FAQ Schema, Toggle status icon, and other customization options.
There is no limitation in using Ultimate Blocks; you can create as many FAQ sections and questions as you want. There is neither any difficulty nor any coding knowledge required. Everything created with Ultimate Blocks will be responsive and won’t hamper the speed of your website.
If you still need more, then Ultimate Blocks has that. There are 21 more blocks available at Ultimate Blocks other than the Content toggle. You may use these blocks to take your website to the next level. The best part of Ultimate Blocks is it is free.
In case you’re interested in adding a proper forum to your WordPress website, look no further than bbPress. It’s one of the most popular plugins of its kind, and for a good reason. Intuitive, packed with cool features, and free, it’s no surprise why bbPress counts more than 300,000 active installs.
Creating a new forum and managing topics and replies is a proper cakewalk. You can set the forum status as open or closed (and also change the status of topics and replies), modify the visibility (public, private, or hidden), specify usernames of forum moderators, etc.
Moreover, you can set a default user role for each newly registered user, use flood protection to discourage users from spamming, enable auto-embedding links, allow users to subscribe to forums and mark topics as favorites, set the number of topics per page, add slugs, and lots more.
This is an excellent plugin that packs all the features you look for in a forum plugin, and then some. With bbPress you definitely can’t go wrong.
Which Plugin to Pick?
When it comes to deciding which one of these WordPress Q&A plugins to activate on your website, first decide what you want to create, whether that’s going to be just a Q&A section, a proper forum, or Q&As on a WooCommerce website. Think about all the functionalities you need, take your budget into consideration, too, and work from there. The decision may seem tough, considering the fact that the plugins from the list come feature-laden, but the good thing is that you can’t go wrong no matter which one of them you decide to go with.
