How To Make An Interactive WordPress Site Using Plugins

Did you know that some of the most viral content online involves a quiz or other interactive media? A recent study by BuzzSumo and Moz showed that viral elements like easy-to-take quizzes that highlight something about the user are some of the most shared content online.

Interactive content formats and encouragement of sharing help promote content and make it go viral, especially on networks like Facebook. Steve Rayson, co-founder of BuzzSumo predicts that we’re going to see more interactive content that people engage with, as opposed to just text format content.

Interactive WordPress Plugins That Your May Use

So how can you go about incorporating interactive elements into your WordPress site? The easiest way to do this is by using plugins that boost interactivity. Here are some ways to make your WordPress site more interactive.

1. Create Quizzes and Polls

Sites like PlayBuzz and BuzzFeed have managed to get humongous amounts of traffic using interactive elements like quizzes to attract shares and engagement. Quizzes and Polls are some of the most viral and interactive elements that you can use on your website.

WordPress plugins like SurveyFunnel is an interactive WordPress plugins that help you create quizzes, personality tests, and opinion polls and embed them on your WordPress site. For more tips on creating BuzzFeed style quizzes for your WordPress site, read the post here.

Survey Funnel helps you generate highly qualified leads on your website by engaging visitors using simple, unobtrusive surveys and understanding who your website visitors are & why they’re here. It also helps in showing your visitors relevant opt-ins and offers.

With this plugin, you can improve lead generation by showing relevant offers and stop overwhelming website visitors with opt-ins and offers.

2. Post User-Generated Content

Your site’s visitors love to see their content posted on your website. You can help them contribute to your WordPress Website content by using a plugin like Listly to create a curated blog post.

Encourage readers to add points to the list that you can approve and feature live on your blog. You can even add voting to your lists so that your readers can add and vote on items in a list.

Another way to incorporate user-generated content into your blog is by using a Q&A plugin like DW Question & Answer, Q&A from WPmudev or WP Answers. Using this you can add a Q&A community section, similar to Quora or Yahoo Answers, to your WordPress site.

Some of these plugins also allow you to reward your users with points and display a leader board to encourage participation.

3. Solicit Content Rating and Feedback

If you have removed the blog comments from your website and prefer instead that site visitors post ratings and feedback of your content using emoticons, there are a number of rating plugins you can use.

WordPress rating plugins, like MyEffecto, Voting – Feelbacks plugin by Vicomi, and FL3R FeelBox, give readers another way of providing an immediate response to let you know whether they enjoyed reading your posts (or not). This will help you get a feel for what sort of content they enjoy.

4. Add Gamification

According to the post here, gamification means introducing elements into a website or application such as points, leaderboards, rewards, ways to “level up”, virtual currencies, and so on.

If you want to use gamification to add an interactive component to your WordPress site or blog, you could reward people for taking actions, such as leaving comments and feedback, sharing content, or writing reviews.

Sites like TripAdvisor use gamification to get users to leave reviews for places they have visited. They also award points that can then be used for frequent flyer miles. Rewarding your visitors in such ways can be quite addictive for them, resulting in them spending more time on your website adding or consuming content.

Achievements for WordPress is a plugin that gamifies your WordPress site with challenges, badges, and points, which are the most engaging way to reward and encourage members of your community to participate.

Leaderboards and rankings bring friendly competition to your community. Now you can give your community members points when they contribute to a discussion, or buy items from your store.

The Captain Up plugin is a game mechanics and user engagement platform for your WordPress site. When you install this plugin, you can immediately start rewarding users for engaging with your content, using points, levels, badges, and leaderboards, and keep them coming back for more.

5. Allow Site Users to Chat With Each Other

Is your WordPress website the kind of place where users would like to interact and chat with each other?

Adding a chat function to your site, with a plugin like Private Messages for UserPro (which requires the WordPress User Profile UserPro plugin to be installed first), can enable private messaging between users and allow users to receive notifications about new messages, view conversations,  or reply to other users.

Another plugin you can use is Chat by WPmudev. It lets you set up public chat sessions, one-on-one chats, chats between the site and network users, BuddyPress Group chats, BuddyPress Friend chats, and more.

Users and visitors can log onto your site, not only with a standard WordPress or BuddyPress account but also with Twitter, Google+ or Facebook credentials. This will increase your site interactivity and get your visitors to spend more time on your website chatting with other users.

6. Turn your PDFs into Interactive Flipbooks

PDFs are not at all user-friendly on mobile devices. Turn your PDFs into fully responsive and interactive Flipbooks with the Real 3D FlipBook WordPress plugin. Just enter the PDF link and your 3D book is ready. You can also create flipbooks by using the FlipBook Creator . Get various deals on the FlipBook Creator on DealFuel, check them out now!

You can also add any HTML content to pages, and create interactive pages with links, buttons, videos, music players, iframes etc. Create video albums, portfolio books with interactive pages, magazines with links, videos, and music.

7. Create Responsive Image Maps

This is a rather fun way to display information about images. The Image Hotspotter plugin allows you to create a user-friendly, interactive, responsive image map. When your site visitors hover their cursor over the image, it opens up a lightbox with more information about the image.

It’s a very interactive way to allow your visitors to browse your image content. I see it as a great tool for photography or art sites that want to offer more information about an image, than simply a larger version of it.

8. Add Board Games

H5P is a free plugin that lets you add board games, memory games, flashcards, ‘drag the words’, and a number of other interactive elements to your WordPress website.

Whether your WordPress website is for kids or adults, adding these interactive elements can make your site irresistible for users and get them to spend more time on your website.

This increases your dwell time – a factor in boosting Google search rankings – and can help your website get more visibility in Google. Interactive plugins can also help you increase visit duration and decrease your bounce rate.

Creating interactive WordPress content is going to become more common as a way to get your website to stand out among the millions of other websites out there, and to create viral content that users love to share.

If you’ve enjoyed these tips to make your WordPress site interactive, do let me know in the comments below.

Related Blogs: 13 Conversion Boosting WordPress Plugins.