Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) are an essential part of business websites these days, especially the one which are providing some kind of products or services. The most common queries generally asked by the users/customers are answered in the FAQ section, to provide a clear understanding of the products or services they are offering.
If your business website is powered with WordPress, there are two ways you could add an FAQ section to your site:
- You could create a new WordPress Page, and manually list all the questions, and their respective answers on that page. Personally, I don’t like this method because it’s very static, and requires manual editing of the entire page, every time you want to add/remove a question from the list. Customization is very limited.
- You could use the FAQ Manager plugin, which simplifies the job for you. You could add or remove questions without much trouble.
In this tutorial, we’d talk about adding an FAQ section using the second method, i.e. by using the FAQ Manager plugin.
Step 1: Install FAQ Manager
Install and Activate the FAQ Manager plugin on your WordPress site.
Step 2: Add Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
After you’ve installed the plugin, a new “FAQs” tab would appear on the side-menu. Under that tab, there are options to add questions, topics or tags for those questions, etc. which work in a very similar fashion to the way the “Posts” system work in WordPress. For the sake of this tutorial, we would create a simple FAQ section, and won’t go much into details regarding the Topics or Tags for the questions.
Now to add FAQs, go to FAQs >> Add New FAQ. A page similar to Add New Post/Page would open. Type the “Question” in the title bar, and it’s “Answer” in the content section of the page. Hit the “Publish” button to save it. You’ve successfully added a new FAQ.
To modify or remove existing questions, you could go to FAQs >> FAQs. From that page, you could manage all the FAQs you’ve added so far.
Step 3: Add FAQ Page
After you’ve created FAQs, it’s time to display them on the front-end. For that, you need to create a new WordPress Page (Pages >> Add New), and use the shortcode [faq] to query all the existing questions, and display them on that page.
There are quite a few shortcodes available with this plugin, and you could go FAQs >> Instructions page to learn more about them.
Step 4 (Optional): Apply Accordion Effect (Collapse/Expand Questions)
This step is optional, in-case, if you want to apply an accordion effect on your questions list, using jQuery. Otherwise, you may jump to the next and final step.
Enabling this option is very simple. Go to FAQs >> Settings, and tick the “Include jQuery collapse / expand”. Also, provide the speed of collapse/expand animation in milliseconds (ms). I’ve used 500 ms, which is fairly normal. Now, click on the “Save Changes” button, for the new settings to take effect.
Step 5: Check the Front-end
That’s it! No more steps. This one is just a placeholder. Open the FAQs page from the front-end to view what you’ve just created. This is how it looks on my end.
So go ahead, create a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) section in WordPress with this method. Let us know if you find this tutorial helpful.