How to Create A Question and Answers Site in WordPress:- Do you want to create a online question and answer community such as Quora and StackOverflow? Question and answer sites are highly engaging and helpful for users. These sites generate revenue from user-written content which makes them an easy to initiate online business.
In this post, we will display how to easily build a questions and answers website in WordPress without any programming skills. You can create a complete website dedicated to Q & A, a single FAQ page, or add a question & answer section to existing WordPress site.
Getting Started with Question and Answers Website:-
To begin with your own question and answers website, you need the following items:
- Domain Name:- (This is your site address on internet)
- Web hosting (This is the place your site stored)
- Question and Answer Add-on for WordPress
A domain name costs approx $14.99/ year & web hosting prices ranges from $7.99 per month (Usually paid yearly). Now it’s not a cheap price if you are just beginner.
Bluehost is one of renowned largest hosting companies in world and an officially recommended WordPress hosting provider.
After you buy a reliable and safe WordPress hosting, they will automatically install WordPress for you and you can also do it manually.
Once you have installed WordPress, you can move on to install a question and answer plugin. WordPress plugins are add-ons that enable users to add new features to your site. That being said, let’s have a look at how to set up questions and answers site in WordPress.
Setting up Your Questions and Answers Site:-
The initial things you need to do is install and activate the DW Question Answers Plugin.
After activation, plugin create two new pages in your website.
- DWQA Questions:- This page will show all questions.
- DWQA Ask Questions:- This page consist of a form where user can ask new questions.
Title and Urls of these pages contains DWQA which looks weird. Let’s change this:
Navigate to Pages>> All pages and click on quick edit link below each page.
This will display page details for quick editing. You can review DWQA from page title and url fields and then click on update button to save changes.
The Next thing you need to do is to enable user registration on your site. This can be achieved by head over to Settings>> General Page.
Scroll down to ‘Membership’ section and check the box next to “Anyone can register”. Make sure that you select Subscriber as the new user default role.
Now that user registration is allowed, let’s configure the plugin setting.
How to Create A Question and Answers Site in WordPress
Initially navigate to Questions>> Settings page. Under General tab, you can configure basic plugin settings. First you need to select the page that shows the Ask Question form and another page that will list all questions. You will see default pages are here already selected.
If you want to display some other pages, then you need to copy and paste shortcodes shown on the setting page to those pages.
Under Question settings section, you can choose the number of questions you want to be displayed on the questions page. Also you can enable moderation by requiring each question to be manually approved.
Also this plugin comes with in-built spam protection features. You can enable Akismet anti-spam feature & provide Akismet API key.
Also you can use reCaptcha to protect your question and answer forum from automated spam bots. Don’t forget to press on save changes to store your settings.
Next, switch to email tab. From here you can upload your logo and modify the email notification sent by the plugin. After that, switch to “permissions” tab. From here you can set up user role permissions. Also this plugin allows anonyms users to ask questions. You can change that from user settings.
Once you satisfied with plugin settings. Don’t forget to click on save changes button.
Managing your Question Answer Site:-
You can see all questions added to your site by going through DW Q&A >> All questions page. As an admin you can edit, add or delete questions submitted by users on site.
Also you can add question categories since user don’t have permissions to add categories. However user can add question tags when submitting questions.
Front-end Feature of Q&A Site:-
DW Questions Answers is designed to work with most of the WordPress themes. Questions can be searched by status, views, categories and answers. Your users post questions, submit their answers, add own comments. Also user can follow questions by click on star icon next to each question.
User who asked question & site administrator has ability to show a question as resolved. Users can vote for answers, select the best answer and add comments to answers and question as well. This offers a much deeper interaction platform to engage in discussions around question topic.
This question and answer plugin is free and perform very well during our tests. These are several questions and answer WordPress themes, but those lock you to use the theme forever. Benefit of using this plugin is that you can switch your theme without losing data.