Top 5+ Best WordPress Community Plugins

Whatever type of website you manage, you’re always looking for new ways to keep and engage your visitors. Along with your website, you must build a consumer community and engage with them. This is where WordPress community plugins come into play.

Online communities continue to add significant value to businesses. A WordPress community plugin can assist you in developing your own social network or online community. You do not have to build a community platform from scratch. There are numerous community plugins available to assist you. In this article, we will discuss the top 5+ best WordPress community plugins for expanding your online business.

What is an Online Community?

An online community is a group of people who communicate and interact using digital tools such as a forum, chat, email, or social networking.

An online community can take several forms and can be completely free or charge a membership fee.

Here are some of the most popular formats:

• WordPress discussion forums (both free and subscriber-based)
• Niche social networks
• Email newsletters for subscribers only.
• WooCommerce subscription-only stores

However, the most important question is what kind of community you wanted to build. Here are some questions to consider as you develop your community website:

• What kind of value do you want to offer your members? Private content, a community of like-minded people, and so on.
• What is the goal of your community? Is it already available online?
• Do you want to create a paid community or keep it free in perpetuity? Or do you prefer a combination of them?
• How will you find new members?
• What kind of content will you produce for your subscribers?

Before you begin building and adding features to your community site, you must have a clear vision for it.

What’s the Importance of a Community Site?

Community sites are fantastic because they bring people together who are already interested in what you have to say. Someone must have liked what they saw and wanted more of it in order to join your community site.

Community sites are an excellent way to increase traffic to your website. The more people who join your community site, the more interactions there will be and, thus, the higher your web traffic will be.

Activity on a community site helps your website rank higher in search engine results. When people read your content and interact with others, your bounce rate decreases, increasing your search engine credit.

Why is WordPress Ideal for Creating a Community Website?

WordPress includes features that make it simple to create a community website. You have a built-in post and commenting system, for example, as well as a powerful CMS.

So, by using WordPress as your foundation, you’ve already taken care of the foundation for your community website.

On top of that, you’ll need the following features to build a thriving online community:

A way for members to sign up, log in, and create a user profile; There are ways for you and your community to interact with each other—through likes, comments, or sharing; Members can chat privately or send non-public messages.

These features aren’t native to WordPress, but you can add them to your site using various WordPress community plugins.

Top 5+ Best WordPress community plugins

Nextend Social Login and Register

Rating: 4.9/5 (365 reviews)

Price: start at $49, free plan available

Nextend Social Login is a contemporary and professional WordPress community building plugin. It enables your users to access your website using their social media accounts. It is compatible with three networks: Google, Facebook, and Twitter.

The plugin integrates seamlessly with your WordPress login account and registration form. On their WordPress page, users can add or remove accounts. A single user may add an unlimited number of social accounts. It supports one-click user registration.

This WordPress community plugin is fully compatible with WooCommerce. It includes several login layouts, login widgets, and simple short codes. There are also editable texts and designs. 

Key features:

• Registration and login with one click via Facebook, Google, and Twitter
• Your existing users can easily link their Facebook, Google, or Twitter accounts to their accounts.
• Because social accounts are linked to WordPress user accounts, any account can be accessed with or without a social account.
• After registration (on first login), you can define a custom redirect URL using any of your social accounts.
• You can specify a custom redirect URL after each login with any of the enabled social accounts.
• As an avatar, show your Facebook, Google, or Twitter profile picture.
• Shortcodes and the login widget
• Designs that can be customized to match your website
• Text on the login buttons can be edited and translated.

Price:

The plugin comes in both a free version and 2 paid plans:

• $49 for a Standard plan
• $99 for a Premium plan

Ultimate Member – User Profile, User Registration, Login & Membership Plugin

Rating: 4.4 /5 (1354 reviews)

Price: start from $249 per year (free plan available)

Another WordPress community plugin that allows you to add visually appealing user profiles to your community site. The plugin takes things a step further by allowing you to create advanced online communities.

With Ultimate Member, your users can easily sign up and become members of your site from the front end. The plugin’s creators have one main goal in mind: to make creating a community site simple and flexible. This plugin completely fulfills this requirement.

The plugin includes a content restriction feature that allows you to restrict your content sections, pages, categories, images, menus, products, and URLs.

Besides, Ultimate Member allows you to create a community site with multiple levels that grant different types of users exclusive access. As a result, you can base your member levels on either free or paid packages. This feature makes it very easy for you to turn your community site into an income source by providing your most valuable content at a fee to those interested without losing the interest of the non-paying members.

Key features:

• Profiles of front-end users
• Registration of front-end users
• Login for front-end users
• Form fields that are unique
• Form field conditional logic
• Form builder with drag and drop
• Page for the user’s account
• Individualized user roles
• Directories of members
• Emails from users
• Restriction on content
• Conditional navigation menus
• On user profiles, display author posts and comments.
• With dozens of actions and filters, it is ideal for developers.

Price:

The plugin comes with a free plan, and 2 premium packages:

• The core plugin is free

• $249 per year for an Extensions Pass
• $299 per year for the Extentions and Theme Pass

BuddyPress

Rating: 4.2/5 (352 reviews)

Pricing: Free

BuddyPress is a free, open-source WordPress plugin that can help you turn your website into your own social network. This plugin is jam-packed with extensions and features that will allow you to build a truly one-of-a-kind social community.

It’s a highly adaptable plugin, so you can build a simple community or enable all of the features and provide your users with multiple communication channels, color schemes, detailed content management, and more.

Another fantastic feature of BuddyPress is its own great collection of plugins that you can use to add even more features to your site. Here are a few more plugins to consider: BuddyBoss Wall, BuddyPress User Blog, and iFlyChat,.

However, some WordPress themes will not be compatible with BuddyPress, so if you intend to use it, you should use a BuddyPress-compatible theme. You can try the Woostify theme in such cases.

Key features:

• Allow users to send one another direct messages.
• Make friend lists and add or remove friends from them.
• Form groups and join groups
• Answer questions in the forum or start new threads.
• Sign up for email alerts.

Price: 

This is a completely free plugin.

Invite Anyone

Rating: 4.5/5 (24 reviews)

Price: Free

If you want to grow your community quickly, friend referrals will be one of the most effective marketing channels available to you.

Invite Anyone is a friend referral plugin that is ideal for your BuddyPress-powered social network.

Social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and others have seen significant growth driven by friend referrals in this manner, so it’s worth implementing if you want to grow your user base organically without spending money on advertising.

Key features:

• Invite members to the site by email.
• Allow group administrators to invite friends to groups.
• Add a search box with auto-suggestions to the Send Invites screen.
• Allow inviters to go straight to the members they want to invite.

Price:

This is a completely free plugin.

bbPress

Rating: 4/5 (320 reviews)

Price: Free

bbPress is a WordPress forum plugin that is both powerful and user-friendly. It can be used to create support forums similar to those found on WordPress.org.

You can, for example, visit the Rank Math plugin’s support forum on WordPress.org here. So, if you want to add a forum like this to your WordPress website and allow your users to interact with it, the bbPress plugin is all you need!

You’ll also have a smooth experience building your site because it works seamlessly with any WordPress theme. It’s a multisite plugin, so you can quickly transfer any settings to another website. bbPress is used to create many popular forums. 

Key features:

• This plugin allows you to sort comments and replies in a blog post or post.

• On the website, users can flag and report inappropriate content.

• This plugin is extremely lightweight and performs admirably.

• You can organize users into groups and assign them roles.

• On your websites, you can set up both site-wide and group forums.

• It includes hundreds of extensions for advanced customizations, such as GD bbPress Attachments and bbPress Notify.

Price:

bbPress is a WordPress community-managed open-source plugin. It’s a free plugin, and you can get it directly from WordPress.org.

BuddyPress Community Bundle

BuddyPress Community Bundle is the perfect way to enhance your social community site using user-friendly and powerful features. Get the ideal way to boost your community with the unique combination of plugin addons in one place. Wbcom Designs offers the ultimate way to include the most-preferred features in your community at affordable prices. These BuddyPress add-ons are the perfect choice for enhancing social interaction and website performance.

 The BuddyPress community bundle provides a smooth experience of buying the most popular plugin addons like BuddyPress Polls, Quotes, Hashtags, Stories, Profile Pro, Profanity, sticky posts, and more. It is the ideal package to increase your website’s popularity and keep your community members engaged. 

Key Features:

• BuddyPress bundle helps boost your website popularity by introducing some of the most powerful features. 
• Allow members to share thoughts with blogging features.
• Boost the discoverability of your member’s posts with Hashtags plugins.
• Enhance the security of your community and members’ data. 
• Extended features to let your member communicate freely. 
• Auto friends feature to encourage member interaction. 
• Analyse through BuddyPress Stats and Who Viewed My Profile for better engagement. 

Price:

The BuddyPress bundle is available in 3 unique packages that include:

• Single License – $249/yr
• 5 License – $399/yr
• Developer License – $599/yr

Final thoughts,

In conclusion, our top five WordPress community plugins will make it simple to create and manage a successful community site. These are the best options for you if you want to create a community blog, a forum, or a social network on your site.

Before you begin, consider the type of community you want to build, the type of content you want to share with members, and how you will provide value and keep it going. Furthermore, don’t start a community site because everyone else is doing it; instead, do it because you have something valuable to offer your members.

Finally, when choosing the best WordPress community plugin, you should pay attention to speed, flexibility, compatibility, and integration for better visitors’ experience.