Community-powered websites encompass everything from Facebook to Twitter to Reddit. And if you’re thinking about setting up your own online community, WordPress is the perfect platform for creating and engaging with your own custom audience.
The advantages of building your own community-powered website are numerous: increased traffic to your site, the “passive” creation of SEO content, and direct access to your most passionate potential customers.
In this post, we’ll start by digging a little further into the benefits, trials, and tribulations of building your own community-powered website, then show you which type of community site is right for your needs and help you through the setup process.
Why Community is King
Two of the hardest tasks facing any site owner are reliably driving people towards a particular site and then taking ownership of the relationship with that audience.
There’s no shortage of internet behemoths out there willing and able to put you in touch with an audience for their own benefit. Whether it’s via paid channels such as Adwords or Facebook Ads, organic means in the form of SEO, or general social outreach, there is a myriad of proven ways and means of attracting a one-time audience.
The downside to most of these approaches is two-fold:
- One way or the other, you’re paying: Whether it’s Adwords dollars or the costs associated with creating content marketing and social marketing, you’re going to be putting your hand in your pocket somewhere along the way.
- You’re at the mercy of a third-party: One little tweak to an algorithm or change to terms and conditions and the party could be over. You’re essentially renting an audience rather than owning it. Facebook’s relatively recent tweaks to its organic reach are a great example of how quickly things can change.
By contrast, creating your own community on a web property you control puts you firmly in charge of the relationship with your audience and gives you a tangible business asset that can be built over time.
Let’s briefly step through some of the main obvious plus points adding a community element to your site can bring:
- Predictable, repeatable traffic: Whether in terms of new user growth or repeat visits, community-based traffic will settle into predictable patterns over time that you can both rely on and seek to iteratively improve.
- Organic creation of SEO content: Assuming you make your site accessible to search engines, an active community regularly churning out high-quality material across a tight set of defined interests can be an excellent source of organic SEO content. For a large scale example of this in action, look no further than the success of Quora.
- Direct access to passionate users: Whether online or offline, service or product based, half the battle in most businesses is targeting people who have an inherent interest in your core offering. Running a community puts them at your virtual doorstep and keeps them there over time.
- Outsourced marketing: Engaged community members naturally attract new people to your site and essentially act as an unpaid arm of your marketing division.
- Ideation: It’s hard to beat a committed community for suggesting future options in terms of either products, offers, or services. With a well-run community in place, you’ll have an instant hotline to real user needs and desires.
Why Running a Community Website is Not a Part-time Job
If you’re an experienced WordPress developer or designer, you’ve almost certainly run across that dreaded client who’s looking to implement a Facebook/Instagram/Reddit clone in WordPress over a weekend with a view towards instant riches and a care-free future. Don’t be that clueless!
The reality is that dipping a toe in community site development will involve a potentially significant outlay in terms of time and money at some stage along the way. The tools are technically there in WordPress to get up and running for very little outlay in either department, but hidden dangers lurk in the wings.
Let’s look at three obvious ones in a little more detail.
1. You’re Subjecting Yourself to Increased Technical Complexity
WordPress has come a long way when it comes to putting community functionality within reach of ordinary site owners. More often than not, however, you’re still faced with a significant step up in terms of overall technical complexity.
To cut a long story short, shared hosting is almost certainly not going to cut it as your community grows. You’re going to have to start moving further up the hosting stack at some stage and begin looking at options like VPS and managed hosting. You may also find yourself needing custom development work sooner rather than later.
You’re also almost certainly going to be dealing with other people’s data which adds a significant extra burden in terms of backups, site security, and change management as you grow your site.
2. You Face a Significant Moderation Overhead
Community sites are natural targets for some of the less savory elements of the internet. Left untended, they can easily devolve into cesspits of spam, hate speech, and porn.
Even with active moderation in place, things won’t always go to plan. MetaFilter and Reddit have faced significant issues over the years, and both Facebook and Twitter are consistently accused of not doing enough in this regard.
Regardless of what type of community solution you go for, you are going to have to actively monitor the output and interactions of that community and be prepared to continually step in where necessary.
All of the technical solutions we’ll be covering below offer automated elements to help with managing this burden, but there is no substitute for manual moderation and an active presence on your own community. You should also start considering the subject of community guidelines and oversight as soon as possible.
3. You’re in the Public Eye
My final point is a brief one and for some people it will be a non-issue. In addition to monitoring community output, you’ll also have to embrace the fact that you are now dealing with a potentially large number of real world people in a very public setting.
If this is a thought that makes you nervous, that’s a fear you’re going to have to come to terms with very quickly indeed in order to make a go of things.
Deciding Which Type of Community Site is Right for You
Options for community sites in WordPress can be split into two broad categories:
- Forum-only: A stripped down forum solution is a great way of dipping your toe in the world of online communities without betting the farm in terms of implementation. It’s an excellent option for first-timers, small niche websites, and e-commerce sites looking to offer simple post-sales support.
- Social network: Facebook and Twitter have shown the riches on offer if you can lock in a mass audience but, realistically, you are going to be after a more niche network to gain any real traction. Ideally, this will be based around clear shared interest and you’ll be able to tap into an existing customer base or offline community.
Regardless of which option you go for, it’s crucial that you have a very clear understanding of who your potential users are and what you want them to do before pulling the trigger. Building a community takes hard work and if you’re starting with wishy-washy definitions at the outset, you’re setting yourself up for a world of pain when it comes to attracting users.
Begin by researching active communities in the area you’re planning on targeting and noting down the key functionality they offer, along with any marketing or branding that grabs your attention. Don’t just click around on these sites, actually register and engage, and pay close attention to the mechanics of the site in terms of elements like registration and user messaging options.
You’ll also want to put some effort into creating user personas for your website. Successful communities attract specific audiences and you want to put as much effort into defining who you expect those people to be as soon as possible.
Adding a forum to your site is the simplest way of testing the waters and it scales well to other solutions so we’ll start there when it comes to implementation.
Creating a Forum-Based Community Website in WordPress
Long before our current crop of social media overlords stalked the earth, forums were happily puttering along as the default community option of choice on thousands of websites worldwide. To this day, they’re an excellent potential community add-on and are well-served by WordPress in terms of implementation.
We’ve gone deep on the complete set of forum implementation options available in WordPress before here on the site, so we’ll limit ourselves to the top three options for getting started quickly.
