Searching for the best WordPress gamification plugins to boost your site’s engagement?
WordPress gamification is the idea of applying elements of game playing to your WordPress site, such as point scoring, leaderboards, awards, quiz results sharing, and so on.
Obviously, WordPress doesn’t include these types of features in the core. But with the help of a WordPress gamification plugin, you can easily gamify WordPress and encourage your users to engage more with your site.
In this post, we’ve curated our picks for the six best gamification plugins for WordPress.
This list includes plugins that will work for pretty much any WordPress site, along with some plugins that offer dedicated integrations for specific use cases such as BuddyPress gamification or LearnPress gamification.
Let’s dig in!
GamiPress is one of the most popular and well-rated plugins for gamification in WordPress, with a 4.9-star rating on over 330 reviews at WordPress.org.
In a nutshell, it lets you award users with digital points for performing different types of actions on your site (with integrations for pretty much every popular plugin – more on that in a second).
Based on these points, you can further reward users with gamified elements such as the following:
You can also use these points to unlock more tangible rewards. For example, you could give someone a discount at your WooCommerce store if they have a certain number of points.
GamiPress also has dedicated integration plugins for most popular WordPress plugins where you might want to add gamification. Here’s a list of some relevant integrations (but this is not the complete list):
Again, that is not the complete list – you can view that here. And even if GamiPress lacks a dedicated integration for the tool that you’re using, you still might be able to connect it because GamiPress also supports “automator” tools like AutomatorWP or Uncanny Automator.
Finally, GamiPress gives you lots of useful ways for interacting with your users, including the following:
Overall, GamiPress’ flexible features and lengthy integration list make it a great option for pretty much any type of WordPress gamification, which is why it’s the first entry on our list.
Price: Free core version and 23+ free add-ons. For Pro add-ons, you can purchase them for $49 each or get a bundle of all add-ons starting at $199.
By the numbers, myCred is the most popular WordPress gamification plugin at WordPress.org, with an excellent 4.6-star rating on over 400 user reviews.
It shares a lot of similarities to the GamiPress plugin above, both in terms of the gamification features that it offers and the wide array of supported integrations for various WordPress plugins.
The basic idea is that you can reward users with digital points for the actions that they take on your site and then use those points for all kinds of things including:
One area where myCred stands out from GamiPress is that it puts a special emphasis on connecting points with real money. This happens in two high-level ways:
If you want to connect your gamified points to real money, myCred is probably the best option for you. For example, setting up WooCommerce gamification to create a gamified rewards program.
However, myCred does support more than just eCommerce gamification. Here’s a partial list of the dedicated integrations that myCred offers:
While myCred hits most of the big names, GamiPress does have a slightly larger integration list. For example, myCred doesn’t have dedicated forum integrations, while GamiPress supports all of the big forum plugins. MyCred does let advanced users set up a bbPress integration using a hook, but you’d need a developer to help.
If you need more flexibility, myCred does offer its own Zapier integration and many automator plugins support myCred, such as Uncanny Automator.
Price: Free core version and 33+ free add-ons. For Pro add-ons, you can purchase them for $29-$69 each (most are $49) or get a bundle of add-ons starting at $149 for basic integrations and going up to $349 for all add-ons.
Unlike the previous two plugins that will work in a lot of different situations, MyRewards is specifically a WooCommerce gamification plugin.
It helps you gamify your store by awarding shoppers points based on their activity and then letting them redeem those points for rewards.
Here are some examples of when you can award points to shoppers:
Shoppers will then be able to view their point totals from their dashboards and you can also add these details to the cart/checkout pages.
Then, you can let shoppers “spend” their points at checkout (either fully or partially covering the order cost). Or, you can also automatically convert points into WooCommerce coupons rather than applying them directly.
The premium version also adds more advanced features such as membership leveling, more advanced rewards (e.g. free shipping or free products), referral programs, and more.
Price: Free version at WordPress.org. Premium version from €99/year (there’s a 30-day free trial).
Quizzes are a great way to add viral gamification to your site. Users can take quizzes and earn a spot on the leaderboard. What’s more, you can also encourage them to share their results on social media, which can help make your site more viral.
While there are plenty of quality quiz plugins, we like Quiz and Survey Master because it does a good job of handling the gamification aspects of quizzes and it’s also the most popular quiz plugin at WordPress.org.
Beyond that, it’s also just a very capable quiz plugin in its own right. You can easily set up quizzes using a variety of different question types, as well as flexible “grading”.
In addition to marking questions as “right/wrong”, you can also set up personality quizzes that don’t have any fixed correct answer (but just share a result based on the user’s answer).
In terms of gamification, one of the plugin’s best features is its Advanced Leaderboard add-on. This lets you gamify your quiz results by creating a frontend leaderboard complete with some or all of the following data:
You can also access other useful features such as social sharing, advanced timers (another useful gamification tool), user dashboards, and more.
Price: Free core plugin. There’s also a free basic leaderboard add-on. The Advanced Leaderboard add-on starts at $10, or you can get a bundle of all add-ons starting at $129.
BadgeOS is another popular gamification plugin at WordPress.org, though its 3.8-star rating doesn’t put it in quite the same league as GamiPress or myCred.
Like those two other gamification plugins, BadgeOS lets you gamify your site by rewarding users with points, achievements, and ranks.
BadgeOS also supports the Open Badge format, which lets you create verifiable badges. While BadgeOS says that it’s the only plugin to do this, GamiPress and myCred also both support the Open Badges format, though GamiPress requires a third-party add-on.
In addition to letting you award points and achievements based on a number of core triggers, BadgeOS also supports dedicated integrations with the following:
There’s also a Zapier integration that lets you connect to the 2,000+ apps on Zapier. Some third-party automator plugins also support BadgeOS, most notably Uncanny Automator.
Price: Free core version and 14 free add-ons. For the 13+ Pro add-ons, you can purchase them individually for $29-$75 each.
WP Optin Wheel is a different type of WordPress gamification plugin. Rather than awarding points and achievements, it lets you grow your email list using gamification.
More specifically, it lets you create a “spin the wheel” game that your visitors can play (in exchange for entering their email addresses) – check out some demos here.
You can enter different prizes as items on the wheel, including controlling the chances of winning each prize. For example, if you have a WooCommerce store, you might offer a coupon as a prize. Or, if you’re a blogger, you might offer a free ebook.
WP Optin Wheel offers integrations with most popular email marketing services, and there’s also a catch-all Zapier integration if you’re using a different service. However, the free version of the plugin only supports Mailchimp.
Price: Free version. Pro version from $49.
That wraps up our thoughts on the best gamification plugins for WordPress.
If you want to gamify WordPress but you’re not sure where to get started, I recommend GamiPress as a great first option because of its solid free version, comprehensive functionality, and massive integration support. Or, myCred is also very good, especially if you want to connect points with real money.
However, the other gamification plugins also have something to offer, so you might want to use a different plugin depending on your use case. For example, if you want to grow your email list, WP Optin Wheel might be the best option.
Do you still have any questions about how to gamify WordPress? Let us know in the comments!
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Great blog with lots of good tips and plugins. I've look at them later.
But I would recommende Easy Quiz Player as quiz plugin which has a modern design with lots of gamifyed features. http://wordpress.org/plugins/easy-quiz-player/