5 Best WordPress Forum Plugins To Build Your Own Community

Alok // September 22, 2017 // 38 Comments

As an amateur WordPress blogger, hope you were well aware of the word “Forum”, right!

Forums are the excellent collection of relevant information or solution you need that you wouldn't just find elsewhere.

Placing an effective signature link will get you more backlinks and traffic, plus a possibility of making relationships with other forum members.

Forums are the great way to get people hanging out and chatting for long periods of time on your sites. Do you know? Handling forums need more time and effort, but the results are amazing in the long run.

In this blog post, I am going to talk about Forum Plugins for your WordPress site.

Creating a discussion thread or a forum on WordPress is relatively simple – All you need to know is “How to Install WordPress Forum Plugins”. Just pick the right forum plugin, install the plugin and you’re almost done.

When it comes to forum plugins, there are huge number plugins for various features and functionalities.

So, here I have come with a collection of the best forum plugins for WordPress so as to help you out choosing the most suitable one for your site.

But before that, let’s discuss what a WordPress Forum is and Why it is important?

What is WordPress Forum? And Why It Is Important?

As we all know, a forum allows you an opportunity to create a virtual online community to connect, discuss, share ideas, and support each other.

By implementing a forum on your website, you can get your site users involved in the community and provide a better platform to learn as well as contribute.

You can share your content among your forum members, help them out with different problems and can interact with each like minded users directly. There are chances you can get to know more about your readers.

One can even get clients via forums depends on what user interface and opportunities you have provided inside your forum.

There is a long list of ideas with the implementation of forums in your WordPress site.

Best WordPress Forum Plugins To Build Your Own Community

Advantages of Having WordPress Forum

  • Works as a question board where users can submit their queries and get it answered.
  • Creates a huge network where everyone can involve with different discussions, share ideas, and network.
  • Forums with the most useful content rank on the top of search results and bring lots of search traffic.

Now decided to install forum plugins for WordPress?  Continue reading…

1. bbPress: The Best Forum Plugin Available for FREE

Best WordPress Forum Plugins To Build Your Own Community

It’s rated as the best forum plugin for WordPress. It is open source software and this plugin will provide you an easy, simple, and speedy WordPress forum solution.

This plugin ensures that your WordPress forum is never slow, overstuffed, or the server hacked.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re an amateur blogger or a novice blogger, using bbPress forum plugin is relatively easy. All you need to do is: Just install and setup plugin. Now, you’re done with the WordPress Forum Plugin.

Pros

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    Compatible with almost every WordPress theme

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    100+ plugins to tweak it to customize

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    Lightweight, user-friendly and fast

Cons

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    Limited feature rich compared to full-fledged CMS like vbulletin.

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    User-Experience little bit poor


2. wpForo Forums: New Features & New Opportunities! 

Best WordPress Forum Plugins To Build Your Own Community

wpForo Forum Plugins are designed for small and extremely large communities. This plugin offers three different layouts: Extended, Simplified and Question and Answer Layout.

The Extended Layout features a classic forum layout, the Simplified layout has a simple yet modern design, and Question and Answer Layout is great for providing support by answering users’ queries.

To use this WordPress Plugin, first and foremost you need to install the plugin from the official WordPress plugin repository and activate it. Next, this plugin will ask you to synchronize users and create the user profile.

And now, you’re ready to add Categories and Forums’, choose a layout, and customize further settings from ‘Forum Settings’.

Pros

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    Compatible with all kind of communities big or small.

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    Offers attractive forum layouts with drag and drop forum management system. And customizable themes.

Cons

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    Important social sharing buttons are yet available.


3. DW Question & AnswerBoth FREE and Premium Versions Available!

Best WordPress Forum Plugins To Build Your Own Community

This Plugin is named for creating a beautiful forum on your WordPress site. This will let you create powerful question and answer system like Quora or Ask.com on your WordPress website.

It allows users to submit questions, search, filter, answer, and vote the best questions/ answers. Just install and setup the plugin, you’re all set to go.

The main advantage of this plugin is – there is no requirement to install any extra plugin to perform certain tasks such as view count, voting, pick the best answer etc.

DW Question & Answer spontaneously counts visitors view count each time someone visits your forum and views the question. This feature of DW Question & Answers Pro helps you search and find out Q and A by the popularity on your website.

Pros

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    Can be used as support forums

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    Users can vote comments

Cons

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    Limited to Question & Answer format


4. Discussion BoardAn Ideal Solution for Adding a Discussion Board

Best WordPress Forum Plugins To Build Your Own Community

Rated as an incredible WordPress Forum Plugin, this plugin is the best solution for adding question & answer forums, discussion boards, and WordPress Forum Support etc.

Unlike other plugins, with Discussion Board Plugin, you can decide who should access to your discussion board; permission to post a comment, view comment.

Discussion Board plugin features - anti-spam fields, shortcodes, automatic setup feature etc. After installing this plugin, it adds three pages i.e. login & registration page, a page for new topics and a page with a list of topics.

This plugin is designed with a simple and user-friendly interface so that anyone can easily configure the settings easily.

Pros

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    Simple and user-friendly with Automatic setup feature

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    Available in both FREE and Premium Version

Cons

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    Useful features are available only on Premium version


5. CM AnswersThe Mostly Used Question and Answer Plugin for Your Website

Best WordPress Forum Plugins To Build Your Own Community

Compared with all other plugins, CM Answers is an amazing forum plugin for WordPress with an ability to create discussion forums where users can add questions and answers in a stack overflow style.

It gives an access to the users to post questions, give answers, comment, vote the best answers, and also upload files for references.

Pros

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    Compatible with most themes

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    Offers you to choose the best answer, profiles, comments

Cons

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    Most of the useful features are available in the premium version only

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    Features get limited to Q&A format


Wrapping Up

Above, we have put together all the best WordPress Forum Plugins 2017.  Each one has its own pros and cons, so we can’t dictate which particular one to choose. It’s all up to you!

I have tried to be as simple as I can while explaining each above-explained plugins, so now take your time to study the plugin features in a detailed manner and pick the one that best fits your needs.

Do you run a successful site that includes a forum? Share your experience with us!

Don't forget to share it with your friends and other social networks.

About the Author Alok

Alok Rana founder of LoudTechie. Like to share his blogging experience and resources with readers. Offering best money making blogging opportunities to new bloggers. He loves to talk about how to blog, SEO, Traffic Strategies and Marketing.

Alok Rana founder of LoudTechie. Like to share his blogging experience and resources with readers. Offering best money making blogging opportunities to new bloggers. He loves to talk about how to blog, SEO, Traffic Strategies and Marketing.

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