Gamify WordPress with these Points Management Plugins

Allowing your visitors to earn points in exchange for their interactions with your content is a great way to help a community to grow around your website. Points can be awarded for signing up, logging in, posting comments, and even when sharing your content on social networks.

The points system has been pioneered by discussion forums and question and answer websites, where users can earn points based on their levels of activity on the sites, and how useful their input is deemed to be by the community.

While there is less scope for awarding points on a regular WordPress site, it can still be done, and by adding an element of gamification to your website, you can help increase the chances of your visitors coming back for more.

The Best Points and Gamification Plugins for WordPress

These free plugins range in scope from simply allowing your readers to earn points for leaving comments, through to systems where users can earn credits which can be redeemed for a discount at your store.

Some point management plugins even allow users to buy credits or points in exchange for their cash, via the popular payments gateways, such as PayPal, making them another option for monetizing your website.

To help you find the right points management plugin for WordPress, here is our take on the most popular options available today.

myCRED

myCRED describe their service is “an adaptive points system for WordPRess powered websites” which does a pretty good job of summing what they can offer in one sentence.

Once installed on your site, this free points management service allows your visitors to earn points based on their interactions, in order to help you keep track of who the most active users amongst your audience or community are.

The points that are earned can even be used in your online store, if you are using one of the popular eCommerce plugins for WordPress, or you could go as far as creating a virtual currency with myCRED for use amongst your community.

Users can trade their points for access to content on your site, and there is also the option for users to buy points using real money, as opposed to earning points based on their interactions with your site.

One nice aspect of myCRED is that its easy to choose which features of the service you want to enable for your site, with the service offering its many features on an opt-in basis, rather than enabling them all by default.

To help myCRED really stand out amongst the competition in this niche, the available add-ons help you extended the functionality of the service to meet your needs, as your site grows. There is a selection of built-in add-ons, as well as some premium add-ons which can be purchased for your site.

The premium add-ons include the following options:

• Stripe payment gateway integration
• Jigoshop eCommerce plugin integration
• SMS payments
• Earn points for watching Vimeo content
• Visual Composer integration

The premium extensions are well worth checking out as they provide a great way to make myCRED even more useful. The free myCRED plugin makes it very easy to integrate the service with your website and begin awarding points to your visitors.

The plugin has a strong 5 out of 5 star rating and has been downloaded over 25,000 times. Installing myCRED on your site is very straightforward and once you’ve created a free account and the free plugin has been activated, you can run the setup wizard to start adding a points system to your WordPress site.

The user interface is nicely designed, making use of the native WordPress UI for seamless integration with your site. You can easily customize the terminology used by the plugin, such as the name for your currency or points system.

Once you’ve configured the basic settings, you can choose which of the optional add-ons to enabled, and then define how points are earned on your site.

The points system is setup under the ‘Hooks’ menu and includes the various ways users can earn or lose points, based on their actions on the site. Some of these options include:

• Registering on your site
• Logging in
• Publishing content
• Commenting
• Clicking on links
• Referring visitors

All of the hooks can be customized, such as whether they are enabled or not, and how many points can be earned for each action.

myCRED is a great all round free option that integrates well with other services, such as BuddyPress, and has lots of good support materials online.

Try myCRED today

CubePoints

CubePoints is another free plugin for WordPress that allows you to award your users points based on their interactions with your site and its content.

Once the CubePoints plugin is installed you get a good range of options to determine how the points or credits are displayed on your site, such as setting a currency prefix or suffix, and then how points are earned and in what amounts.

The actions that can earn your users points are a little less impressive than myCRED with only four actions included by default. However there are some modules which are included, and can be enabled to allow your users to earn credits for other actions on your site including:

• Watching a YouTube video
• Visiting the site each day
• Activate a points multiplier for a set period
• Give authors points when their content recieves a comment

With the optional CubePoints modules, you can enable the ability to deduct points from users for accessing certain content on your site, and also give them the option of buying more points using PayPal.

Depending on how you’ve configured this gamification plugin for WordPress, users can earn a new rank once they have accumulated a certain amount of points. With the plugin you can create as many ranks as necessary and set the amount of credits a user must have to earn that rank.

There are also a few other plugins available for extending CubePoints so it can work with other WordPress plugins or function in other ways, such as:

• BuddyPress integration
• WP Job Manager CubePoints
• CubeGold issues gold and minutes
• WooCube Pro create a loyalty programme for your store

CubePoints is a fairly basic points or credits earning plugin, but its very easy to use and quick to implement on a site.

The fact that it is open source, rather than a closed hosted system, means that others are free to build their own extensions for it, which in theory could see this become a very useful tool in the future.

Try CubePoints today

Achievements for WordPress

BuddyPress is the free plugin for WordPRess that allows you to build your own social network for your site, business, organization, or community. Its a powerful tool with many third party extensions available for it.

One of those extensions that can help you build a popular social network with WordPress is this gamification and points plugin: Achievements for WordPress. As this plugin was created by the one of the developers of BuddyPress you can expect a good level of usability and compatibility with BuddyPress.

While setting up your BuddyPress-powered social network is relatively straightforward, getting users to sign up and join your community can be hard, and encouraging them to stick around and keep contributing, can be even harder.

Thankfully with a plugin like Achievements you can give your users another reason to keep coming back to your site. The points, ranks, badges, and ranking system allows you to bring some friendly competition to your site, and help foster more of a community amongst your users.

Actions which can earn points range from inviting contacts to join the site, replying to topics, or being an active members of the site for a set period of time. Then once a set number of points have been earned, an award is granted.

As well as working with the BuddyPress plugin, Achievements also works with bbPress, WP e-Commerce, and BuddyStream to name but a few.

Try Achievements for WordPress

Captain Up

This free plugin links your site to your free Captain Up account, and then allows you to start giving your visitors the chance to earn points and rewards for the actions they perform on your site.

Through the Captain Up dashboard on your site, you can select which pages or content the plugin is activate on or not, but apart from that, all the configuration takes place on the Captain Up website.

From your account on their site, you can create the levels, select the actions that can earn points, and configure the badges that can be awarded. However, the service comes equipped with all the items you need to get started, so you can just use the default settings to get going.

One of the things that helps make this the most accomplished points and gamification option for WordPress is that it includes social sharing amongst the actions that can earn a user points.

Captain Up allows your visitors to earn points for Tweeting and +1’ing your content, as well as watching YouTube and Vimeo videos on your site.

Captain Up is a feature-rich and well designed points and badges hosted system that  WordPress users can add to their site, and is definitely worth checking out.

Try Captain Up

WordPoints

This plugin looks quite similar to myCRED, but is perhaps a bit easier to use and manage, due to its much scaled back feature set. It uses a comparable hooks system for letting you determine which actions can earn your visitors points.

From the Points Hooks section of the plugin, once it is installed on your site, you can use the list of included available hooks, customize how many points each hook can earn a user, or create your own hooks.

This looks like a work in progress, so its probably best to keep an eye on this plugin for the future, rather than deploying it to your site as it is. You can check the roadmap on the developer’s website to see how it is progressing.

Try WordPoints

Conclusion

Many of the other points and gamification plugins for WordPress haven’t been updated for a few years, however the above selection seem to be in development or at least have been updated fairly recently.

If you want a simple way to start allowing your readers to earn points and credits for their interactions with your site, which can in turn be used to increase their rank, earn badges, and even use for discounts on your products, then there should be something amongst these plugins that can help you out.

Do you visitor any sites that offer point-based incentives for interacting and if so, do you use them?