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10 Best Gamification WordPress Plugins to Engage Your Users
In recent years we have seen an explosion in the use of gamification and it has become commonplace for a lot of brands. If you are planning to create a learning management system, eCommerce websites, social communities, or lead generation websites, then these game contexts in WordPress can be really helpful for you. In this post, we share the 10 best WordPress gamification plugins you can use on your site.
What is Gamification?
Gamification is a technique of incorporating gameplay elements into a non-gaming context. By rewarding their audience for completing certain tasks, companies seek to increase engagement and loyalty, encourage communication and collaboration, educate, entertain, and inspire their users. Gamification can be used on all sorts of websites such as personal, blogs, eCommerce, quiz portals, job boards, affiliate marketing, and online communities.
Benefits of Gamification
Below are some of the benefits of gamification due to which it has become popular among both high-profile organizations and those only just beginning their business adventures.
- Motivates users to take more actions on your website
- Improves traffic for your website
- It helps you get valuable information about customer behavior
- Improves productivity of users on the website
- Ensures that the visitors turn into loyal users of your website
- It can be used for all sorts of niches which makes it a versatile tool.
- Sets your website apart from the competition
- Ensures brand recognition
Best Gamification Plugins For WordPress
There are many great plugins that you will be able to use to employ gamification onto a WordPress website easily. Here are some of the best WordPress gamification plugins that you can use to enhance the user experience.
1. GamiPress
If you are looking for the easiest way to gamify your WordPress website for free, here it is. GamiPress allows you to reward your users with various kinds of awards and badges for interacting on your website. In addition to that, you will be able to illustrate the achievements, organize the requirements, and select from a wide range of customizable assessment options to check if each requirement has been achieved successfully or not. Its features include social sharing, point types, achievement types, rank types, automatic points awards and deductions, custom requirements, time-limit requirements, drag and drop controls, social sharing, emails, logs, unlock achievements, open badges compatible, drag and drop functionality, live shortcode embedder, GDPR support, shortcodes, widgets, templates system, data centralization on multisite, and many more. It is developer-friendly. What’s more, GamiPress is compatible with popular WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, Learn Dash, Gravity, bbPress, WooCommerce, Buddyboss, Automator WP, Lifter LMS, Ninja Forms, The Events Calendar, Vimeo, etc.
Pros
- It is loaded with incredible features
- It comes with powerful add-ons
- It is flexible
- It is simple and easy to use
- It is customizable
- It is free
Cons
- None found
Price
- Free
2. myCRED
Another WordPress game plugin that is popular and effective is myCRED. It is an intelligent and adaptive points management system that allows you to build and manage a broad range of digital rewards like points, ranks and, badges on your WordPress/WooCommerce powered websites. In addition to that, this plugin enables you to build brand loyalty by rewarding your customers, store reward systems, community leaderboards, monetizing your website content, etc. As a matter of fact, rewarding your users for community engagement purposes will let you grow your business. BuddyPress, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Contact Form 7, etc are the popular WordPress plugins that myCred supports. Its main features are point balances, multisite support, badges, ranks, coupons, bootstrap ready, BuddyPress ready, and many more. Three different ways are used to award the users through myCRED. First, points – it set events and triggers to allow real-time tracking and automatically award your users with points; Ranks – it set ranks within your leaderboards and reward your users with perks after they reach a specific milestone, and Badges – it helps you boost your users’ participation by rewarding them for their exceptional performance.
Pros
- It is easy to use
- This plugin supports various features
- It allows you to manage pints and logs from users automatically
- You will instantly gain access to 50+ myCRED add-ons
- It offers premium support and priority updates
- It provides one membership license key that works for all add-ons
Cons
- It is hard to find complaints as myCRED is considered one of the best gamification plugins.
Price
- Free
3. Badge OS
One of the reasons you should use BadgeOS for gamification for WordPress is that it turns your site into an achievement badging and engagement management system. As we know that awarding and motivating the members to do well in the future has become essential. This is why the awarding system is crucial if you want to attract more visitors to your site. Since there are various ways to motivate and encourage visitors, however, in this badge system, it will be visible to the other members and they will work hard to achieve the badge. Furthermore, your users will be able to complete steps, demonstrate skills and knowledge, and earn digital badges, points, or ranks. BadgeOs is a powerful tool that has features like nominations and review, point thresholds, auto-approving submissions, number of shortcodes, and extensibility and BadgeOS Add-Ons. You can create unlimited rank types and unlimited point types. In addition to that, BadgeOS is integrated with LearnDash, LifterLMS, EDD, and WooCommerce.
Pros
- It supports the BuddyPress WordPress plugin
- It offers excellent support
- It offers BadgeOs customization
- It is integrated with LearnDash
- It offers an open support ticket
Cons
- It can slow down page speed
Price
- Free
4. BePro Points
With BePro Points, you can add true gamification via points and rewards with WooCommerce. Everyone wants a system like this. This plugin links two free plugins together i.e, BePro Points WooCommerce. This plugin enables, you to use to reward users with points to interact and engage them with your website. In addition to that, all users on your website can add, reduce, and viewpoint log transactions through this plugin. The main features of BePro Points include working with any WordPress installation, reward users for comments, rewarding users for new posts, reward users for registration, and many more. Users can earn virtual credits on your website by, posting comments or reviews, creating posts, making a purchase, or even something simple like logging in. You can showcase users with the highest points or point activity in user profiles. If we talk about WooCommerce – it is a complete eCommerce system. This facilitates the management of products like details, categories, and prices. BePro is when combined with WooCommerce, the use of points from the BePro points plugin to be used for the purchase of products through the WooCommerce plugin.
Pros
- With this plugin, you can reward users for doing various activities
- You can allow the users to redeem the rewards for products
- It gives users a real incentive to interact with your website frequently
Cons
- None found as this plugin has been made as efficient as possible
Price
- $49
5. Captain Up
Captain Up is one of the best WordPress plugins for games. If you want to maximize engagement, make your users’ journey engaging and rewarding then Captain Up is an ideal choice for you. This gamification plugin allows you to immediately reward the users with points, badges, levels, so forth, and so on. It is a fully-featured plugin that offers features including customization, social tools, in-app communication, actionable analytics, multiple badges, multiple levels, deep insights and statistics, unlimited actions to reward users, compatibility with all the devices like mobile and tablet, support for over 18 languages, user behavior analytics, in-app notifications, and many more. These features address user motivation and help you engage players with your brand. These features were designed keeping in my that these features must assist marketers in achieving their most valued KPI’s leveraging behavioral economic insights and best practices. What are you waiting for? Find your most passionate and influential customers through one of the best WordPress game plugins, Captain Up.
Pros
- It enables you to turn your visitors into an active and vibrant community
- It offers customized pop-ups
- It offers bulk messaging
- It increases user engagement
- It turns your users into loyal brand ambassadors
- It allows your users to log into your site using their social media
Cons
- None
Price
- Free
6. WP Optin Wheel
If you are looking for a gamification plugin for email marketing, WP Optin Wheel can assist you. WP Optin Wheel helps you grow your email list and sales as it offers your visitors an opportunity to win a coupon or other prize by spinning the wheel of fortune. It comes with features like beautiful predefined themes, seasonal themes (Christmas, Halloween, etc) multiple wheels, and many more. It enables you to capture emails into MailChimp. Moreover, by this plugin, you can create multiple wheels, configure the chance of winning for each slice, configure each of the wheel’s 12 slices separately and choose between a losing slice, a discount, or a link to product, page, etc. Apart from that when to show the popup can be also controlled by WP Optin Wheel. Plus, it supports Messenger opt-in via ChatFuel or Chatchamp. It offers a shortcode to display the wheel in any post, page, or widget (not as a popup, but directly on the page).
Pros
- It is compatible with any language
- It offers the ability to log wins/losses in a separate log file
- It is GDPR ready
- It is integrated with WooCommerce
- It offers replays
- It is developer-friendly
Cons
- None found
Price
- Free
7. KingSumo Giveaways
KingSumo Giveaways is primarily used by authors to promote their book giveaways as well as many blogs and business hosting giveaways on WordPress. KingSumo Giveaways is fast and easy to deploy. This gamification plugin is for you if you are looking for an effective and not-so-pricey solution. You will not need to pay monthly or annual fees. Once you buy it you get it for a lifetime. You can run all of the giveaways you have planned for WordPress without having second thoughts about additional costs. It comes with excellent support. It can be the best way to gamify your WordPress site. You can set it up so quickly and promote it to your site visitors. When visitors share contests your email subscribers will increase. In that case, it grows your audience virally. Its features include giveaways, full optimization, scheduled dates of giveaways, and more. What’s more awesome is that KingSumo Giveaways has been defined in a way that looks beautiful on smartphones as well.
Pros
- It saves time
- It is fast
- It is cost-effective
- It is fully optimized
- It is installed so easily
Cons
- It does not have all the flexibility to create your contest from scratch
- It is quite limited in terms of appearance
- You can not use GIFs or videos on the landing page.
Price
- $228 for Lifetime Personal License
8. WooRewards
The free version of the WooRewards lets you award points after your eStore’s visitors perform a certain action. The plugin assigns points to customers whenever they spend money, place their first order or leave a product review in your store.
Once a customer accumulates enough points, the plugin generates a voucher for different products. Moreover, customers can monitor how many points they have to know when they can become eligible for a reward.
You’ll have to upgrade to the plugin’s Pro version if you want to utilize the ambassador system or create loyalty programs. WeRewards’ full version also enables you to offer a wider range of rewards, including free shipping, cart discounts, and free products.
What’s more, you can use it to create holiday-themed events during which you can offer giveaways or award points to loyal customers.
Pros
- WeRewards is compatible with other gamification plugins
- Store owners have an overview of their customers’ points history
- Users can send personalized emails to site visitors whenever they unlock a new reward
- It offers multiple leveling and membership systems
Cons
- Developing multiple loyalty programs with the free version of WeRewards isn’t possible
Price
- Free
- Monthly Subscription – $9.99
- Annual Subscription – $99.00
- Web Agency – $249 per year
- Lifetime License – $249
9. WPAchievements
A gamification plugin like WPAchievements can help you retain visitors by creating quests they need to complete to unlock content or earn points.
The plugin doesn’t limit the number of quests or achievements users can create. Moreover, you can choose the actions, achievements, and tasks a visitor needs to take to complete to earn a custom badge.
Besides awarding points for different actions, admins can also punish unwanted behavior by taking away points or demoting the website’s visitors to a lower level. The plugin has a shortcode generator so you can easily add a quest to any page on your website.
Pros
- The plugin is mobile-friendly
- WPAchievements is compatible with 25 WordPress plugins
- Advanced reporting and data analytics tools
- The plugin is available in all languages
Cons
- Users must check if their website’s theme is compatible with the WPAchievements plugin
Price
- Free
- $40 one-time fee
10. RafflePress
Although it isn’t primarily a gamification plugin, RafflePress can help you introduce gaming elements to your site. Its drag-and-drop builder lets you create a giveaway campaign and select actions site visitors must perform to join.
Moreover, you can use giveaway templates if you don’t want to build a giveaway page from scratch.
RafflePress has anti-fraud features that prevent the same visitor from joining a giveaway more than once and ensure all participants have an equal chance to win the prize.
The plugin has social-sharing functionalities so visitors can share the giveaway on their social media accounts and invite friends to participate.
Integrating the RafflePress with Mailchimp or some other mailing service will help you expand your mailing list while keeping your site’s visitors engaged and entertained.
Pros
- RafflePress is lightweight and it doesn’t slow down websites
- It allows users to build giveaway landing pages
- The plugin offers powerful tracking and retargeting features
Cons
- Awarding points to visitors or creating loyalty programs with RafflePress isn’t possible
Price
- Plus – $79 per year
- Pro – $199 per year
- Growth – $399 per year
- Ultimate – $999 per year
Frequently Asked Questions about WordPress Gamification Plugins
What is Gamification in WordPress?
Gamification is the process of introducing game elements on a WordPress website with the purpose of increasing its engagement rates.
Awarding points to website visitors when they perform a certain action, assigning a badge to accounts on your site, or organizing competitions are some of the most common gamification elements.
Websites also use gamification for education purposes in order to motivate learners to accumulate points and unlock more content. Social media platforms like LinkedIn utilize gamification to encourage users to provide as much information as possible on their profiles.
How Do I Gamify My Website?
Introducing a rewards program or adding a progress bar to the account setup wizard are some of the most common examples of website gamification.
You’ll need a plugin to add these elements to your website if you’re not skilled enough to create them with code. The gamification elements you can add to your website will depend on the plugin you choose.
Hence, you can opt to award points to visitors who make their first order or assign badges to loyal customers. These elements can help you attract new customers or retain old ones by allowing you to offer them products at a discounted price or some other reward.
What are the Examples of Gamification?
Quizzes, loyalty programs, and points are some of the most common examples of gamification. For instance, Booking.com has a Miles & More program within which users collect miles that qualify them for different discounts.
Prompting website visitors to gather points to unlock content is another common gamification technique that is often used on eLearning sites. However, gamification can also mean that a website is using gaming mechanics.
So, all websites that use progress bars on their Sign In pages contain elements of gamification.
What’s your favorite WordPress gamification plugin?
Using gamification plugins to your WordPress site is a great way for your brand to increase traffic and user participation in the long run. So why not use gamification to your advantage? And let us assure you, no matter which one of these plugins you choose, you won’t go wrong.
Punchtab is a cool service. Nice post bud ;)
This is awesome!!! I didn’t even know WP could do this… perfect for a project I’m working on!!! Thanks for writing and sharing!!! :-)
Could you tell is a bit more about you built it ?
Highly interesting Oliver, thanks for this post.
Thanks very much for including Symbly in your blog post
No probs, nice icons :)
Recently heard Matt Cutts say that Google don’t use bounce rates as a metric purely because users who go to a site might find what they want quickly but the site is still a quality and authoritative site so, the bounce rate will be high, thus the reason he said they dont use it in the algos.
FYI BigDoor is no longer supported for wordpress. I have been doing some research on this subject to make my gaming site more attractive. Once I change themes I will be adding gamification. I am trying to decide between CubePoints and PunchTab. Unless the theme I use has BuddyPress then I might check out the Buddypress achievements. If you have to choose one which would you choose? Just wondering, thanks for the post.
i use punchtab currently, but today i realize that there is another gimification beside punchtab..
thanks for sharing Oli, i’d like to share it on my blog..
How does ‘Punchtab’ work for you? It looks like an expensive choice if you need some extra customization.
Thanks for covering. I’m the author of the Achievements for BuddyPress plugin. Version 3.0 of the plugin will work on regular WordPress (BP not required). Keep an eye on https://achievementsapp.com and https://github.com/paulgibbs/achievements/.
Nice Paul. Any idea when this would be released. We’re like to try it.
Hoping to have a beta in a month or so. I’ve been totally busy with BuddyPress recently.
Great article! That was really helpful. It looks like ‘BigDoor’ is not supported by WordPress anymore though.
Really great! Many thanks! But I am searching for a system that calculates and displays an ongoing user’s activity index from 0 to 100%. So the index can increase and decrease from time to time according to what he does since the date he has signed in. Which plugin can do this??? Many thanks for your help!
Nice!!! Thanks , I was looking for stuff like this!
Asking questions are truly fastidious thing if you are not understanding something entirely, however this article presents good understanding even.
Currently it seems like Expression Engine is the top blogging platform out
there right now. (from what I’ve read) Is that what you’re using on your blog?