As your website grows, adding a forum section can help in building a community and having regular visitors.
In this article we are going to share 3 of the best forum plugins that will help you add a forum section to your website.
Importance of a forum
- A forum helps keep your users engaged and build a community.
- As users create new threads and post replies it leads to new content on your website which is helpful for SEO and will lead to increased traffic from search engines.
- A forum will help build a following of visitors who will be regular on your website.
3 best forum plugins for your WordPress website
- bbPress –
This is one of the most popular forum plugins on the WordPress plugins store with over 300,000+ active installations. It is also one of the easiest to set up and get started with. It can handle a large number of users and is built to scale. Some of its features include:
- Hundreds of extensions and many themes already developed to be used with bbPress.
- Simple design but powerful software. This makes the forum lightweight and fast.
- The plugin and its extensions are completely free.
2. BuddyPress –
BuddyPress also comes from the same development team as bbPress, but the thing that separates BuddyPress is it has complete social networking features and is targeted towards building online communities. Visitors can make user profiles, creare groups, send private messages and many other things. Some of the features of BuddyPress include:
- Integrates with most of the WordPress themes and plugins.
- Create a complete social network or online community.
- Free and opensource.
3. wpForo Forum –
wpForo is famous for its modern and responsive design. Although free, additional features such as custom user fields, private messaging, polls and many more features can be added by purchasing their add ons. Some of its features include:
- Various design layouts with easy to customize options.
- Built with SEO in mind, caching, spam prevention and XML sitemaps.
- Can be integrated with the BuddyPress plugin for extending the forum with social media features.
Final Thoughts
A regular WordPress website can be hosted on small hosting plans but running a forum on top of your WordPress website will require additional resources if you want your website to function smoothly. It is also important to choose the right forum plugin depending on your requirements. It will be very hard to transfer your existing forum data to another forum software later on.