At some point during the course our online entrepreneurial journey, we find ourselves asking what next? What can we do to keep our readers engaged? Sure, video is a great way to improve user stickiness. So is podcasting. But sometimes, we just don’t have the bandwidth to carry out those activities. Creating good videos and podcasts take time and effort – not only to plan, but to prepare and market as well.
Here’s an idea – quizzes! Quizzes are an excellent way to keep your users engaged. People spend time interacting with the quiz, as a result of which they spend a lot of time in your site. Here’s why quizzes are great for your content marketing efforts:
People start spending more time on your site. This means lower bounce rates.
Lower bounce rates mean better SEO scores.
Quizzes improve user-engagement and stickiness – they set you apart from the test
People tend to start following you as a brand, which build brand loyalty.
Loyal users are the most likely people to purchase your product or service, and stick through it.
If the product is good, loyal users become long-term users, which increases the customer lifetime value.
Loyal users also tend to recommend your product or service to their friends, family and colleagues – classic word-of-mouth marketing.
All of the above factors directly increase conversions and revenue.
Plus, quizzes are a heck of lot fun to create!
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Why Quizzes are the Real Deal
To give you an idea that we’re not fooling around, check out this BuzzSumo report that highlights the most shared content in social media in 2015. #8 in that list is quizzing people. For example, a quiz entitled What is Your Most Dominant Trait? from PlayBuzz got almost 4 million shares on social media.
Here are a few sites killing their social shares using quizzes:
Disney
Disney’s top quiz “Who is your Disney Spirit Animal” received over 800,000 shares.
Country Outfitter (Fashion brand)
This fashion brand’s Garth Brooks lyrics quiz received over 60,000 shares, making it their tenth highest shared piece of content in the last 12 months.
BuzzFeed
Well, it’s Buzzfeed.
The Best Quiz Plugins for WordPress
Now that you are (hopefully) convinced that quizzes do well for you, let’s get started. Today’s post will cover some of the best free and premium quizzing plugins for WordPress.
1. CM Quiz Manager
Create unlimited quizzes for your WordPress site with the CM Quiz Manager. Whether you want to create an educational quiz as a part of a course or a fun/creative quiz to include in a pop culture article this is the plugin for you.
There are options for multiple choice questions, multimedia, one question per page, a quiz timer, emailed results and more you can easily create a variety of quizzes for your site. Include as many questions as you’d like to each quiz, with as many choices and answers as you want – there’s no limit. And adding your quiz to a page is as easy as copy and pasting a shortcode.
Other features of CM Quiz Manager include HTML support, true/false tests, deep multiple answer questions, randomized quizzes, locked content based on score, progress reports, review answers, show all answers after submissions and even copy protection. You can also add user profiles using the After Registration Extended Profile add-on.
2. Quiz Maker (Freemium)
Quiz Maker is a stand out plugin. The free version of the plugin includes plenty of features to build unlimited interactive quizzes for your WordPress site. Add questions with radio buttons, checkboxes, dropdowns, text or number fields. And there are 6 styles to choose from so you can quickly have a quiz that matches your site.
Other helpful features include a timer, quiz progress bar, option to add images to questions, results page, restrict quiz based on user role and more. You can also randomize your questions and answers, so if you’re using the quiz in an academic setting no two tests will be the same.
There is also a pro version of the Quiz Maker plugin which grants access to features for lead generation (via integration with Zapier, ActiveCampaign, MailChimp, etc), emailed results, content protection (so your quizzes can’t be copy & pasted) custom form fields, weighted answers, required questions, password protection, leaderboards, WooCommerce integration, scheduled quizzes, certificate upon quiz completion and more.
3. OnionBuzz Viral Quiz Creator
If you want to build your own BuzzFeed-like quizzes then the OnionBuzz quiz creator is the plugin for you. This powerful plugin includes easy options for quiz layouts, feeds/categories, MailChimp integration (lock quiz results), and even custom formats including: personality, trivia, lists, ranked lists, flip cards and more to come!
Just use the built-in options to create your custom quiz, then use the automatically generated shortcode to insert it on any post, page or widget ready area on your website. Plus all of the quizzes you create with OnionBuzz are completely responsive and mobile friendly – so it’s the perfect addition to your viral website!
OnionBuzz Quiz Maker allows you to use 3 different types of answers for your quizzes: lists, grids or matches. These answer types will provide any of your quizzes with interesting choices, which could be even transformed into an exciting story or interactive adventure for your users. Post-answer options can display the right variant just after the use’s selection or after the end of the whole test.
Social sharing buttons can be easily added to any of your quizzes, which gives ample opportunities for your content to become really viral. You can also add the subscription form to your email newsletter. This will help to enlarge your subscribers base significantly, especially in a conjunction with content locker (providing a user email to continue a quiz or to see the results). Mailchimp integration allows to add new subscribers directly to your base on this service.
OnionBuzz Viral Quiz Maker ensures the wide customization opportunities for styles, layouts and question ordering. You can display quizzes as a full list or as a slider with one question per slide. User-defined or random question ordering can increase the revisiting value for each quiz.
OnionBuzz is suitable not only for entertainment purposes, but also for serious test on some school or university subjects, as well as a tool for preparing and checking your knowledge.
OnionBuzz Viral Quiz Maker is fully mobile responsive and optimized for use with WordPress widgets. Special feeds option can help to filter your quizzes by categories.
4. WP-Quiz (Freemium)
WP-Quiz is an all-in-one quiz plugin which lets you create unlimited quizzes, that are optimized for mobile view and works with any WordPress theme. The plugin makes it very simple to create three types of quizzes:
It gives you an intuitive interface for each of these quiz types. Once you’ve created a quiz, you can include it in any post or page using a shortcode. You can also split the quiz into multiple pages, which increases pageviews. However, some users (including myself) might drop off, if they are unable to get a single-page view of the quiz.
Apart from these features, the pro version of the plugin gives you enhanced features such as Google Analytics and Facebook’s Open Graph integration, randomize questions, etc.
A set of features that I particularly found interesting were the “conversion centric” ones. Humans by nature are curious people (that’s how we got where we are today), and this feature leverages that very aspect of human psychology. Features like subscribe or share post to see results plays on the curiosity of the user and forces them to take action (i.e. share or subscribe), in order to view their results.
5. WordPress Viral Quiz Builder
Viral Quiz Builder enables you to quickly build BuzzFeed-style quizzes, which are also capable of capturing leads. The plugin supports MailChimp and Aweber and ActiveCampaign email marketing software.
There are two types of quizzes – personality test and trivia, with the option to randomize the order to questions. You can also create multi-page quizzes with “browser refresh” feature, which increases your site’s pageviews.
The plugin supports hiding the quiz results behind content lockers such as an email optin box or social share, compelling the user to subscribe or share your post, before they can see the results.
6. OpinionStage (Freemium)
OpinionStage is a hosted content-enhancement solution trusted by brands like BBC, MTV and ReadersDigest. The platform can be used to create beautiful polls, detailed surveys and engaging quizzes. (We’re going to stick to the quizzes part.)
First off, the solution is hosted, it means that your server’s resources are saved – the calculation is managed by OpinionStage. You can create personality and trivia quizzes, and customize elements of the quiz including font size, colours, etc.
Once you create a quiz, you either host in in OpinionStage website or embed it in your own site. We highly recommend the latter, since our objective is to increase user-engagement in our site.
The premium version of the plugin starts at $19/mo, and gives you access to deeper social network integration, better analytics and the ability to generate leads from your quizzes.
7. Advisor Quiz
The Advisor Quiz Plugin is the jack-of-all-trades quiz plugin for WordPress with four quiz types: trivia, personality, count and content filter. In each question, you can embed multimedia files, assign different points, embed custom fields, and display a correct or incorrect response message.
In the quiz, you can randomize answers, create dependent questions based on previous answers, allow multiple answers, attach content suggestions to results, add new user registration upon quiz completion, track logged in users and also view quiz statistics.
8. Quiz and Survey Master (Free)
Quiz and Survey Master helps you build customizable quizzes and surveys in your WordPress website. Question type includes multiple choice with radio boxes, dropdown menus, multiple entries using checkboxes, binary answers (such as true/false, yes/no, etc.) and open ended questions.
The plugin has other useful features such as emailing the results, setting time limit, displaying hints, answer explanation placement, comment boxes for each question, require user login, etc.
9. Quizly
The Quizly plugin makes getting started easy with the plugin’s drag and drop quiz builder. You can randomize both the questions and answers, share to Facebook and Twitter, add images, include answer explanations and enable auto scroll to next question. The plugin also has cool features such as a a quiz log, import/export quiz, and the ability to use the quiz to collect emails.
10. Quiz Cat (Free)
Quiz Cat enables you to creates immersive quiz landing pages. This feature itself can lead to a possible increase in social shares, when compared to in-post quizzes. The plugin supports multiple choice questions and the ability to randomize the options, in order to ensure that the reader actually reads the questions. At the end of the quiz, you can create unlimited custom message based on the user’s score.
11. Ultimate Quiz
Ultimate Quiz is a simple premium quiz plugin that supports multiple choice questions. The plugin enables you to choose from 9 different question types, add multiple choices with points for correct choices, enable/disable user ability to retake a quiz, add descriptions and more. Plus it’s easy to import/export submitted quizzes and filter based on quiz or user.
12. Chained Quiz (Free)
A fairly new plugin in the family, Chained Quiz has only over 1000 installations at the time of writing this post. The plugin enables you to build dynamic quizzes where the next question is dependent on the answer of the previous question. It can be used to create pretty cool quizzes which reveal your personality or emotional quotient.
You create single-choice, multiple-choice or essay-type questions in your quiz, and assign points to each answer. The results are calculated based on the final scores.
13. Riddle (Free)
Riddle is a polls, surveys and quiz hosting service with the ability to capture leads when a visitor participates in a quiz. Like OpinionStage, the service is used by big brands such as AdWeek, The Huffington Post, etc.
The plugin supports lead capturing to multiple channels such as Aweber, MailChimp or other CRMs via Zaiper. The Integrations feature enables you to search and embed images from Facebook, Instagram and Google Images, straight into your quiz.
14. Ari Stream Quiz
The most impressive feature of ARI Stream Quiz is the lead capture functionality. Integrated with popular email marketing services like MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, ConstantContact, GetResponse and more. It includes all the basic features of the quiz plugin including unlimited quizzes, multiple-choice questions and randomization of both questions and answers. At the end of the quiz, the results are displayed along with a customizable ranking.
15. HD Quiz (Free)
HD Quiz enables you to create highly customizable quizzes and questionnaires with timers, multiple question types, pagination and more. You can also add tooltips, gifs and images. And all quizzes are mobile ready, touch friendly and translation ready. The plugin includes tons of easy options to choose from. The plugin shows shareable quiz results, Pass/Fail text, and more for completed quizzes.
16. Watu (Freemium)
Watu enables you to conduct quizzes with open-ended, multiple-choice and single choice questions. Questions can also be made as mandatory, where the user must answer it to participate in the quiz.
Like most plugins, each question can be assigned a unique score, which at the end of the quiz is calculated in the result. Watu can also generate a basic bar chart showing user points vs. average points on a given quiz, along with a list of all participants.
The Watu to MailChimp Bridge is an interesting companion plugin that automatically adds uses who take your quiz, to your MailChimp list. It is always a best practice to notify (or even use an opt-out checkbox) the quiz participant that he/she will be subscribed to the list upon taking the quiz. That way you’d avoid negative sentiment for your brand.
The premium version of the plugin starts at $49 (including one year of support and updates) and brings features such as quiz result exports, login-only quiz features and more. The higher plans at $87+ gives you the ability to charge users to access a quiz. Furthermore, it has additional quiz types such as “Fill in the Blanks” and “Sort the Values”, and other useful features such as Intelligence and Reporting modules.
Which Quiz is Right for You?
It’s a crowded blogging world out there, isn’t it? We all want to stand out. For that, we need a following – a loyal user base. However, building a loyal user base is no easy task.
Once you start getting steady traffic in your website, you should also start the nourishment process. It takes time to nurture your visitors and convert them into readers, and eventually into loyal fans.
When you prepare a quiz for your visitors, you tend to stand apart from the rest. The more relevant the quiz is to your content – higher the chances of building loyal visitors. And while we have shared a number of great plugins, do keep in mind that there are other awesome options like the Jotform Quiz Maker that you can use too.
Just remember – traffic is a generic term. All websites get traffic. Niche websites get targeted traffic. Getting traffic is getting visitors.
Visitors don’t convert easily. Readers to. Loyal users convert better.
So, the next time you launch a service or product, who do you think is going to buy it?
What are your favourite quiz plugins for WordPress? Did we miss your plugin? Let us know in the comments below!