And the Winner is: WPForo Forum Plugin for WordPress

ByMaximus

Updated: July 2023

Coming from the old Bulletin Boards (BBS) era and then from standalone PHP forums, i was pleasantly surprised when i discovered wpForo for WordPress forum plugin, a few years ago.

Although it is a plugin for WordPress and has some limitations due to the WordPress platform, wpForo comes very close to being a real standalone forum script. It boasts a vast array of features and is completely free. If you need some extra functionality, you can purchase additional plugins at a very reasonable cost.

How about speed? wpForo has its own database tables within the WordPress database and doesn’t use custom posts. This removes some WordPress limitations, but wpForo still performs a lot of database transactions, especially on busy forums. Despite this, the speed is adequate even on a shared hosting plan, thanks to wpForo’s efficient internal caching. If you run (or plan to run) a large forum with lots of traffic, you will need a powerful and stable hosting plan.

How about SEO? wpForo has its own SEO support, so make sure it is fully compatible with your SEO plugin. Some SEO plugins are “wpForo aware,” but not all.

How about optimizers? wpForo is already internally optimized and works well with the Autoptimize plugin if you need it. However, in 2022 and with http/2, any page optimizers are somewhat unnecessary in my opinion.

What makes wpForo to really stand out from other plugins, is the exceptional support for a free plugin. gVectors run a busy forum for wpForo, with plenty of information and fast support from staff that knows what they we talking about.

If you need a forum plugin for WordPress, wpForo is definitely the right choice for you.

WordPress plugins that work right along with wpForo:

SEO Framework the best SEO plugin for WordPress, 100% compatible with wpForo.

GD Mail Queue for solving email sending from wpForo.

Ad Inserter for ANY kind of ads and more.

Also you may check some high quality and reasonably priced plugins for wpForo.

Related posts:

  1. Discover How To Find And Fix Broken Links In Your Forum Posts
  2. 2 Snippets for wpForo Plugin You Can’t Live Without
  3. ZenCache: The BEST Caching Plugin for WordPress
  4. A Little Jewel Plugin for WordPress: No Cache AJAX Widgets
  5. ZenCache, Comet Cache …. You name it. Still the BEST Caching Plugin!

Maximus Decimus Meridius: Maximus is an entirely fictitious character but seems to be based on several characters, including Avidius Cassius, a general in Marcus Aurelius' armies.

Currently it is believed that he was a webmaster in his previous life.

2 Comments

  1. You praise so much the support for wpForo at their forums.
    While i agree upto a point, if you have a complicated issue, then things are not so good and you are practically at you own. Their support is very good for general questions and small issues, like css conflicts with your theme.

    1. There no mystery here, their support forum is open to read to anyone. Anyone can visit and see what exactly is happening. For me the support for wpForo is very good. They even login to your site to check and maybe fix things.
      If an issue is so complicated, it is probably not directly related to wpForo but to hosting. This is what i know.

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