Are you planning to add a community forum to your WordPress website for getting more user engagement? A WordPress forum plugin can help you to do this.

That’s today we’ll talk about the bbPress plugin the most popular free forum plugin developed by the WordPress community. Besides, you’ll understand the importance of adding the forum section to your site. In addition, you’ll get the entire information about bbPress step by step.

Before we get started, take a look out the below quick navigation that we’ll try to cover it.

Let’s stats our journey.

What Can A WordPress Forum Plugin Do For You?

Why you should use forum plugin to your website

A WordPress forum plugin is a piece of software that helps to build a community using a website’s users. Where WordPress site users or visitors can participate globally for sharing knowledge and experience with others.

In fact, you can imagine it as a platform of problem-solving, Q & A (question & answers), and a discussion board where people would like to talk to each other. In addition, if you are dealing with vast people you have to set up a forum on your website.

How To Start A Forum On Your WordPress Website

There are some advantages to establishing a community forum in a website.

Firstly, using WordPress forum software is a very effective way to provide customer support. A community means a lot of people stay on the same platform at a time. So you can easily reach tons of your customers at the same time. Most importantly, it’s a very fast and powerful way of serving users and solving their problems.

Secondly, it also helps your website development. Moreover, an online community helps your user engagement so it’ll be a great chance to grab more users’ attention. And when you’ll get your potential user that means your sale will be increasing rapidly.

Thirdly, having a forum is a great advantage of site ranking & performance. The more you generate and serving traffic the more go-ahead for world call rank. Plus it also creates a positive impact on your website SEO.

bbPress Plugin At A Glance

bbPress wordpress plugin at a glance

bbPress is forum software made by the WordPress community back in 2004. It was first published on wordpress.org from that moment it has been turned into a plugin and serves unlimited WordPress users in the glove.

bbPress is a free open-source WordPress forum plugin that can be used for unlimited sites by the same user. Therefore, it’s a very simple and easy-to-use software that allows any user to create their own forum community platform.

In addition, it also comes with the full integration of any popular WordPress themes as well as maintaining the same coding standard. Most importantly, if you have a WordPress website then you’ll able to build your forum easily by following some guidelines.

It has a very dedicated support team and they can help to solve any problem regarding this amazing tool. So you don’t need to worry about seeking solutions to your problem.

bbPress at a glance:

  • Total download 7 million
  • 300k active installation
  • Page speed 99% faster than other plugins
  • Over 10 years of experience
  • Outstanding rating and review
  • An issue in memory usage

For more info, you can easily see the below infographic where bbPress performance is measured by WP Hive.

Performance

bbPress is performing well for the past 10 years. It has been doing a great job in all the departments except for the use of memory. It uses 1625.77 KB of memory which is 90% more than other plugins.

But when you come to the page speed it rocks. Here bbPress is faster more 99% than other plugins that is a better page speed optimization result. In addition, it also has proven stats you can find the image below.

bbPress performnce test

Ratings & Reviews

When you talk about the bbPress rating & review, you find the best results. Because it is specially built by the WordPress community and love by the people who already love WordPress.

In the next image you’ll its overall rating and reviews.

bbPress overall rating

If want to see some more bbPress test result click the button below.

Why Should You Use bbPress For Your Website?

Why you should need bbPress forum plugin to design your website forum

If you are looking for forum software for your WordPress site, you find a lot of them. But most of the WordPress forum plugin has to not enhance the functionality that the bbPress plugin has.

As we mentioned earlier bbPress is a powerful free forum-making tool. With this, you can easily make your own custom discussion platform for your valuable user. In fact, this software also allows many advanced extensions to increase your forum capability.

Besides, you find so many online video tutorials and blog posts about bbPress. Plus it has rich documentation that also will help your forum setup.

Astra

Pros & Cons of bbPress

Pros & Corns of bbPress

You can find some pros & cons in all types of software. Here in this section, we’ll talk about some of the pros and cons of bbPress so that you can understand it better.

Pros

  • bbPress is free open-source software and you can use it unlimited times.
  • It easily compatible Easy integration with any WordPress themes.
  • Maintain the same coding standard as like WordPress.
  • Fast and lightweight.
  • Loved by more than 300000+ users all over the world.
  • It can be used in multiple sites and manage from one dashboard.
  • It has more than hundreds of extensions for better customization.

Cons

  • It allows only the basic features, so you need to install additional extensions for adding more functionalities.

bbPress vs BuddyPress

bbPress and BuddyPress are very popular forum plugins that used tons of WordPress site users around the world. If we compare these two super plugins side by side then it’ll be more understandable to you.

In the below image you see the difference between these amazing plugins. Here we show why they differ.

Memory Usage

memory usage of bbPress vs BuddyPress

In the use of memory, bbPress uses +1625.77 KB on the other BuddyPress uses +1740.82 KB. So the winner is bbPress because it reduces more memory space than BuddyPress.

Page Speed

page speed test between bbPress and BuddyPress

Page speed is also an important matter of a website. Here we see BuddyPress is better than bbPress. Why? BuddyPress load faster than bbPress. So the winner is BuddyPress.

Rating & Other Criteria

Rating & Other Criteria of bbPress vs BuddyPress

Both of the plugins have own criteria and they are doing well eneoug in their fields.

Price

bbPress is a free software for their users. As it has not yet launched any premium version of their plugin.

So, you can easily download and install bbPress and try it for yourself.

Common FAQ You Might Have Regarding bbPress Plugin

bbPress common faqs

Now we’ll cover some common FAQ that you need to know before star working with bbPress.

1. How to enable registration?

By default, It is always kept disabled by WordPress. To enable the registration system, you need to log in to your WordPress dashboard. Then go to Setting-> General and enable Anyone to Register.

2. How can I allow users to register on the site’s forum?

Your website users can register to your site by using the same registration WordPress provides. Besides, you also can use the supplied registration form shortcode you can find it here. After completing their registration successfully your users can participate in your forum.

3. How to prevent users from entering the WordPress backend?

It is up to you what type of users you will select to access your site’s backend. However, to prevent the users entering from the WordPress dashboard you can use this code. Where you’ll find the solution with an easy guideline.

4. How to install bbPress themes?

You might get the proper details if you read this article to install bbPress compatible themes.

5. How to set up my forums?

You can easily set up your dream forum by following two steps. First, you have to configure the forum setting.

Secondly, create some content for your forum. That all.

6. How to customize bbPress?

Everyone loves to customize the website in their own style. you can also modify the bbPress forum functionality. To do this visit here.

7. How to remove all the forum content and delete bbPress?

If you really remove of the content you have to follow the bbPress deleting process.

It’s very difficult to answer all of your questions at the same time. For more faqs of bbPress please visit its official faq page.

Conclusion

At last, we’re coming to the closing part of our statement about bbPress. We hope this detailed bbPress plugin review will help you learn a lot of the necessary stuff. We also believe that this guide will help you to make a proper decision about the making of a forum.

Besides, you may be able to understand the importance of forum software and how to set it up your WordPress site. If you have any queries regarding bbPress and its set up please comment us below now.

We’ll try to serve our best.

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The plugin has some issues

Sorry, pal! The plugin couldn’t pass all our tests. No hard feelings, right?

Tests done by WP Hive test script Results
  • Minimal impact on memory usage The memory usage of this plugin is less than the average memory usage of other plugins on WordPress.org + 200KB. Check FAQ for more.
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  • Minimal impact on pagespeed The impact of this plugin on PageSpeed is less than the average impact of other plugins on WordPress.org + 1000 milliseconds
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  • No PHP errors, warning, notices WP Hive automated test found no PHP error while activating this plugin on our server
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  • No Javascript issues WP Hive automated test found no JavaScrip error while activating this plugin on our server
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  • Latest PHP 8.1.12 compatible WP Hive automated test found the plugin fully compatible with the latest version of PHP
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  • Latest WordPress 6.5.5 compatible WP Hive automated test found the plugin fully compatible with the latest version of WordPress
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  • Optimized database footprint The plugin creates less than 50 database tables
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  • No activation errors WP Hive automated test found no activation error while activating this plugin on our server
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  • No resource errors WP Hive automated test found no resource error/s while trying this plugin on our server
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  • Frequently updated The plugin was not updated at least once in the last 90 days
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All the plugins are tested on the same server with exactly same configuration via test script that automatically activates and logs the data WP Hive shows.

  • All the scripts run on a VPS with 8 CPU cores and 8 GB of RAM.
  • The test sites are hosted on Google Cloud VM instances, one site/plugin per instance. The machine type is n1-standard-1. The server is a 8 core CPU with 8GB of RAM.
  • The test sites are hosted on Apache/2 server and they are tested on PHP 8.1.12 & WordPress 6.5.5.
  • The database server is MySQL 10.6.10 and the default PHP memory limit is 512M.
Download Iocn

9M

Total Downloads

Installation Iocn

100K

Active Installation

Calendar Iocn

15 years

On WordPress

Growth Iocn

0.0%

Growth Rate

Support Iocn

0

Support Thread

Rating Iocn

338

Ratings on WordPress

Download Iocn

00

Downloads This Week

Update Iocn

00

Ago Last Updated

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About bbPress

Description

Are you looking for a timeless, elegant, and streamlined discussion board? bbPress is easy to integrate, easy to use, and is built to scale with your growing community. bbPress is intentionally simple yet infinitely powerful forum software, built by contributors to WordPress.

Read More >>

Explore all plugins from The bbPress Contributors

Performance

Memory Usage

  • Download Icon Average memory usage is167.99 KB
  • Download Icon This is more than89%plugins

Page Speed

  • Download Icon Average page loading time is increased by 0.03 s
  • Download Iocn This is faster than99%plugins

Speed Test Benchmark Learn more how we collect the data

  • Before plugin activation
  • After plugin activation

Pages

Benchmark

Change

Average Change
- 0.03s
/(front page)
- 0.08s
/wp-admin/edit-comments.php
- 0.06s
/wp-admin/edit-tags.php?taxonomy=category
+ 0.01s
/wp-admin/edit.php
+ 0.02s
/wp-admin/index.php
+ 0.02s
/wp-admin/media-new.php
- 0.05s
/wp-admin/options-discussion.php
+ 0.18s
/wp-admin/options-writing.php
- 0.04s
/wp-admin/post-new.php
- 0.2s
/wp-admin/post-new.php?post_type=page
- 0.06s
/wp-admin/upload.php
- 0.03s
MoreLess

Memory Usage Memory Usage Benchmark Learn more how we collect the data

  • Before plugin activation
  • After plugin activation

Pages

Benchmark

Change

Average Change
+ 167.99KB
/ (front page)
+ 128.28KB
/wp-admin/edit-comments.php
+ 166.73KB
/wp-admin/edit-tags.php?taxonomy=category
+ 169.4KB
/wp-admin/edit.php
+ 178.09KB
/wp-admin/index.php
+ 168.33KB
/wp-admin/media-new.php
+ 168.25KB
/wp-admin/options-discussion.php
+ 167.02KB
/wp-admin/options-writing.php
+ 165.79KB
/wp-admin/post-new.php
+ 184.66KB
/wp-admin/post-new.php?post_type=page
+ 184.1KB
/wp-admin/upload.php
+ 167.27KB
MoreLess

Stats Stats

Download Statistics

Plugin Version Usage

Stats More

Database Tables

The plugin has added 0 additional options to your WordPress.

Errors

Frequently Updated

  • The plugin has not been updated in the last 90 days.

Read more how WP Hive determines this data.

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