In the present competitive environment, social media emerges as the most effective medium for advertising your brand. Currently, grasping the interest of prospects involves obtaining the perfect mix of social and digital interaction. So, community blogs or social networks comprise one such channel that businesses can employ to cultivate trust around their products. With the aid of powerful communities, businesses find it simpler to nurture the followers and improve their brand image. So, forming a community on WordPress is one simple way of achieving it and it appears to be quite straightforward if employing the proper tools: WordPress community plugins.
With the presence of a multitude of WordPress community plugins, it has got easy to operate a WordPress social network site. These tools are useful as they foster people engagement on the site for a longer duration.
# 1 BuddyPress
BuddyPress constitutes the most common social networking tool to incorporate your WordPress site. This plugin proves to be of benefit to those users who are completely new to this WordPress sphere and presents good quality products and excellent support.
Features:
Many plugins for expanding the functionality.
Packed with plenty of advanced features.
Contains addition of points system to arouse user engagement.
Present in different languages, BuddyPress comprises a modern and advanced social network software with awesome add-on features.
BuddyPress should be your preferred plugin for the following reasons:
First and foremost, it’s free and open-source as per your liking.
It integrates excellently with WP.
It is surrounded by a buzzing community
It’s owner is Automaticc (the company driving WordPress.com) so you can be aware of its clout.
There’s plenty of themes which particularly combine with BuddyPress.
Besides, it drives a WordPress blog into the realm of a social network with strong features like user groups, user profiles, activity streams.
So, if you wish to buzz up any community, BuddyPress offers you an edge. Whether it’s a college, school or campus, your company’s intranet, a community of hobbyists, or a product social network, BuddyPress should be your preferred WP plugin.
Setting up BuddyPress also is quite easy.
# 2 bbPress
After you’ve installed your social network, you may also desire to include the most interactive plugins available – a bulletin board or forum.
bbPress constitutes another splendid piece of open-source software. bbPress concentrates on ease of integration, web standards, ease of use, and speed.
The code is maintained as tiny and light as possible while still permitting superb add-on features through WordPress’s substantial plugin system.
What does all that imply? bbPress is mean, lean, and prepared to adopt any job you cast at it. If you consider it a nice inclusion to your website – then proceed, install it and configure it.
# 3 Users Ultra
This plugin is the most pursued solution if you are intending to design an enhanced user community in no time. This plugin can be quickly combined with any WordPress theme permitting you to insert numerous fields based on your requirements by utilizing the Fields Customizer Tool.
This plugin includes a “Follow” feature that permits the users to pursue another user’s activity.
Butressed with reCaptcha for safeguarding your site from bots and spammers.
The plugin permits users to sign up or log in by utilizing email as well as social networking sites.
You can personalize the existing components easily and make your community site as specific as your brand.
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# 4 UserPro
UserPro is one of the best WordPress community plugins that combine smoothly with different WordPress plugins. This plugin arrives with the option to follow or unfollow users, content limitations, one-click sign up or photo uploads. Apart from this, it also contains a complete range of payment methods, social wall, email marketing and much more.
Completely responsive design that makes it appear totally flawless on any screen size.
Being present in 12 languages, this plugin also includes translation-ready features.
This customizable plugin includes 5 ready to use skins if you simply want to install it and go live asap.
With the aid of improved member directory option, you can display members in an attractive way.
WordPress Social Network/BuddyPress Themes
It’s always accepted that if something doesn’t appear truly good – then it’s going to have a truly difficult time being popular.
So after installing your social network with WP and BuddyPress, your next extremely vital step is to enrich yourself with an awesome looking design.
The crux is that you need to ensure that the look selected by you is not simply a template. You need to ensure your theme is BuddyPress prepared – else, it’s going to cost you plenty of time and effort with probably mediocre outcomes.
So,after reviewing the finest options out there this is the pick which should be nice choices for installing your WordPress community or social network.
These entire themes are BuddyPress compliant affording a splendid experience for community’s members and users.
A developer might still be needed by you to customize your choice.
# 1 Divi
Divi has progressed to be among the most flexible products, whether you wish to employ it to design a blog, community, single page websites, or a combination of entire these, Divi has you attended to. Being a theme as well as page builder, you are aware that you can achieve really anything you desire with Divi.
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# 2 Reign
Reign theme include everything, from building a community, to a social network, and with the probability to also install eCommerce on your site, so you’re really covered from each aspect.
Obviously, it totally integrates with BuddyPress and BBPress so you can ensure these products work fine.
The attraction of this theme though arises from its installation – the installation wizard is truly solid and really configures most of the site for you, so at that point, it’s simply a matter of tweaking a few of the images and content to adapt to your personal specific community.
It also configures multiple additional tools like Revolution Slider and others for Social Sharing etc.
But the power, obviously, emerges from the actual Members and Groups functionality, and the BuddyPress personalization options and the Inbuilt Social Profile module, where the theme truly shines.
These little bits of functionality carry such a community site to the next stage, particularly if the scope of the site is networking or dating.
Some extra features:
rtMedia support
Support for Easy Digital downloads
Elementor built-in
BP Activity social sharing
WordPress Social Login
Member Reviews
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# 3 Kleo
Kleo is a superb social networking related theme – it is compliant with the newest version of BuddyPress and WP and is always becoming updated to ensure it remains above the latest versions.
Kleo is very flexible, wholly customizable theme. You needn’t be an expert designer or developer to design an amazing website with Kleo. You can quickly build a striking community, or social networking website. Kleo has complete tools to get you going.
# 4 Mingle
Obviously, if the single aim for your site is to design a social network or community, then you may even opt for such a design as Mingle – this constitutes a WordPress template which has been built particularly for building a community – so the name Mingle.
Mingle constitutes a BuddyPress ready WordPress theme. Mingle has been built as a modifiable and highly intuitive template with administration features affording you total control of the website’s layout and design. The specific and easy to handle design assures you the site will be distinguished and kept in memory.
# 6 Huber
Numerous times the cause for designing a community site is to build reviews. Even though this is not the main aim, reviews are generally quite a nice feature to better the engagement of a site. This item is highlighted specifically on this – reviews. Huber is a WordPress and BuddyPress theme that presents you with solid reviews and community features.
The product has its personal review system to deliver you the following review features smoothly:
Users can rank posts from the top of the review, through the comments of both
Both the post author as well as visitor can rate posts
Sort reviews by title, date, site and user ratings
Multiset rating (different rating criteria for individual posts)
Vote up/down other users comments
Conclusion
Limitless customization possibilities integrated into WordPress have rendered it simpler than ever to design and host your individual online community. You are not required to create your community platform from scratch. There are multiple WordPress community plugins and themes to aid you get started. After you have determined the purpose you desire your online community to cater to, you will discover community plugins for all needs.
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