FAQ Plugins for WordPress – what’s the benefit?

Home » Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) » FAQ Plugins for WordPress – what’s the benefit?

In this pragmatic guide about FAQ WordPress Plugins, you’ll learn why FAQs are brilliant for your website from an SEO and conversion perspective. Discover how to choose an FAQ Plugin for WordPress, and learn the difference between FAQs and a knowledge base.

 

What is a Frequently Asked Question (FAQ)?

As the name suggests, it’s a question that your target customers and existing customers often ask you or your team. It’s a piece of content where you repeat the question being asked, followed by a paragraph or two that answers it. You’re simply answering commonly-asked questions.

In an ideal world, you’d have many client, customer and prospect questions that you can answer in an FAQ. Or you can use empathy to put yourself in the mindset of your target customer preemptively answering questions they have on their mind.

Those questions could be worries or sales objections that allow you to reassure your prospect before they purchase or get in touch. When your prospect feels more comfortable with you and your service, they are more likely to trust you and make a purchase or enquiry.

 

What’s the difference between a knowledge base and a FAQ page? And which is better?

A knowledge base is a section on your website that features informative articles, just like this one, explaining different concepts and ideas. The knowledge base should increase the prospect’s understanding of your business’s products or services. This has the primary benefit of improving your prospect’s ability to determine if you’re a good fit for them or not.

As part of the prospect’s research and learning, it will help them choose which of your products or services are a good fit for them. When the prospect trusts you as a source of information, this has a very positive side effect. Namely, it will improve the probability that the prospect will want to spend money with you (rather than one of your competitors).

Knowledge base articles consist of several paragraphs of text content, perhaps a video or two and maybe some images. As a general rule, it’s one topic per page/article. The topic might cover several elements and use subheadings too.

Comparing an FAQ Page to a Knowledge base Article

By contrast, FAQs are often very short, usually 1-3 paragraphs of content. Images or videos are used less frequently with FAQs. You’d expect to find several FAQs on a single page on a website grouped into sections on the page. Or you might have 2-10 FAQ pages, each covering a different group of FAQs and their answers.

Neither is better. There’s lots of value in using both at the same time. You can use:

  • A knowledge base to inform and attract new prospects
  • FAQs to answer queries and objections to help you get the sale or lead

 

Why have FAQs on your website?

To help grow your business, you’ll obviously want to attract visitors and leads to your website and improve conversions (i.e. selling a product or leads from enquiries about purchasing one of your services). A knowledge base can help you to attract visitors to your website, and FAQs particularly help with generating leads and sales.

You’ll want to place FAQs in locations where you have a lead capture form or where someone can purchase a product. These answers will then help to reduce any doubts or questions that your prospect has about doing business with you.

Here’s a list of example FAQs you might answer on your website:

  • “How long until your parcel is dispatched?”
  • “How long does delivery take?”
  • “Can I pay for next-day delivery?”
  • “How long will it take for us to reply to your enquiry?”
  • “What happens if something goes wrong?”
  • “What’s the refund guarantee?”

If you have lots of questions that you want to answer with your FAQs, you find a distinct benefit by using an FAQ Plugin for WordPress.

 

Why use a FAQ Plugins for WordPress? Can you create FAQs without using a plugin?

The simple answer, using a FAQ plugin is much easier when managing your FAQs.

Yes, it is possible to create FAQs without a plugin. It’d only be worth not using a plugin if you’re technical and happy to write the code to create your own FAQ with the presentation and schema notation needed to do it well.

If you’re busy like most business owners, you might as well benefit how much easier it is to manage FAQ content with an FAQ plugin.

The core reasons using an FAQ plugin on WordPress include:

  • You avoid the need to fiddle with HTML formatting when moving FAQs around.
  • You can change the order and categorisation of your FAQs without needing code. You can even hide/remove/edit FAQs across your whole website from a single place in the WordPress admin.
  • Most plugins will give you a variety of design and presentation styles for your FAQs, making it easy to blend them in to the rest of your website whilst ensuring that your FAQs are readable.
  • Paid-for WordPress FAQ plugins will have ticket-based support, meaning you can get technical help if you get stuck setting something up or if there’s a conflict with another plugin.

 

Can a FAQ plugin for WordPress be good for SEO?

Yes. If you use structured data( also known as rich snippets or schema, with your FAQs), there is the potential for those questions to show up in Google search results when searchers type questions very similar to the FAQs that you’ve created.

As with all SEO, there are some nuances and details to this that would allow your FAQs to show up in search results. However, if you use an FAQ plugin that natively supports rich snippets, then you’re going to increase the chance that your FAQs will end up showing in the search results.

 

What are the best FAQ Plugins for WordPress?

In short, nearly all FAQ plugins are excellent. It’s difficult to say which is the “best”. Different plugins have different strengths, so it comes down to which tool you like that does the job well enough.

We encourage you to follow a very pragmatic selection process when choosing the right FAQ plugin for your WordPress website. Just ask yourself these questions:

  • Is it paid-for (premium) or free?
  • Is there a way to give it a trial on a free version to see if you like it?
  • If you’re time-poor, opt for a paid-for plugin so that you get access to technical support
  • If you have a website that’s multi-lingual, then ensure the FAQ plugin has multi-lingual support.
  • Does it support multiple FAQ pages?
  • But ultimately, does it do what you want it to do?
    • How easy is it to create articles?
    • How easy is it to get them to show on your pages?
    • How good do the FAQs look?

 

How to choose a WordPress FAQ plugin…

Try 2-3 plugins, compare them, see which ones you like. If you have WordPress staging as part of your web hosting, then test the plugin on the staging version of your website, NOT the live version of your website. That reduces the chance that the plugins will ‘clog up’ your live website with database ‘stuff’.

(Technically speaking, am referring to the plugin-specific database tables, and data in the post, post_meta and options tables that plugins invariably create).

 

Here are some FAQ plugins worthy of your attention.

There’s no particular order to these. Have a look and see which one grabs your fancy.

 

We currently have a knowledge base plugin for WordPress that we sell, and we may add FAQ support in the future too, but it doesn’t have FAQ support at the time of writing.