Starting a forum with WordPress doesn’t have to be difficult. With the right plugin for your forum, you can make this a very easy process. Here are some of the benefits of setting up a forum and a few great plugins to make it easy with WordPress.

Benefits of a Forum

Adding a forum to your website provides many benefits including:

• Higher Sales Volume – You will be able to advertise in your forum, which can lead to more sales.
• More Content – Forums often have threads listed very high in Google because of the large amount of content. With a forum, you will have plenty contributors posting questions, answering questions and providing useful information.
• Your own Community – A community of users in a forum can be very powerful.
• Easy Market Research – You can ask your forum users questions and find out what they do or don’t want.
• More Return Visitors – With a forum, you give your visitors a good reason to return.

There are several other benefits of a forum, but these are the main benefits.

Best Forum Plugins for WordPress

With the right plugin, you can easily add a forum to your WordPress website. Here are a few of the top choices.

CM Answers (https://wordpress.org/plugins/cm-answers/)

A Q&A type of format, CM Answers provides a great choice for your forum. You can easily integrate this plugin with most WordPress themes and users can vote on both answers and questions. The premium version provides more features, such as social media login, profiles, best answers and more. If you don’t mind limiting your forum to the Q&A format, this is a great choice. Upgrading to the premium version will give you the best features, however.

BuddyPress (https://buddypress.org/)

An easy-to-use plugin that works with most WordPress Themes, BuddyPress is a top choice for your forum. You can create activity streams, social connections, user profiles, groups and much more. You can even add a points system to your forum to help with user engagement. The only real issue with this plugin is the challenge of moving a BuddyPress site from one platform to another.

WP Symposium (https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-symposium/)

With the WP Symposium forum plugin, you will get plenty of features. This is a bit more like a social network than a forum, however. With the premium membership, you gain access to premium support. You can also use features, such as alerts, gallery, events and Facebook integration.

bbPress (https://bbpress.org/)

Maybe the best-known and the top forum plugin for WordPress, bbPress provides an easy way to set up your forum. It’s built for WordPress and will use some of the core to provide an easy to integrate plugin without huge modifications. There are about 100+ plugins you can use with bbPress to make it even better.

The best part about using this plugin is that it’s fast and lightweight. This means you won’t lose site load speed because of the forum. If you don’t plan on using vbulletin, PHPBB or Vanilla Forums for your forum website, bbPress is a great alternative.

DW Question & Answer (https://wordpress.org/plugins/dw-question-answer/)

DW Question & Answer provides a Q&A type of forum with plenty of benefits. You can use tags and categories for better SEO, along with the ability to vote on answers. Users can comment on answers and you will have good CAPTCHA support to keep spam to a minimum. This plugin works well as a support forum, as well.

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