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How to Create a Quiz in WordPress

You’ve found the right guide if you want to know how to create a fun quiz in WordPress. Blogs and websites don’t only have to be pages of text and images. Those that encourage visitor interaction are more interesting and engaging than those that don’t. The best thing about online quizzes is the variety, whether it’s 2-minute fun, curiosity, self-assessment tests, or educational.

Types of Online Quiz formats

There are many quiz formats you can match to your site, topics, and audience. They can be static or dynamic, easy or difficult, timed or timeless, long, or short. Used wisely, quizzes make a site more appealing and interactive. That can result in extra visitors and reduced bounce rates.

Here are a few of the popular online quiz formats.

  • Multiple choice
  • True/false.
  • Fill-in-the-blank
  • Fill-in-multiple-blanks
  • Multiple drop-down choices
  • Matching this with that
  • Numerical answers

Internet quizzes save a player’s input to analyse the response and display results. The last part is the dangling carrot that keeps users on the page.

Benefits of Online Quizzes for Site Owners

Everyone who builds a WordPress website or blog strives to make it a success. The aim is always to attract lots of traffic, or more importantly, targeted traffic. Quizzes can help to achieve this.

Viral quizzes

Quizzes that prove a big hit with players can be addictive—in a good way—and have the potential to go viral. A viral response lets savvy site owners collect valuable data in a short space of time. That could produce some great leads if you sell products and services, or act as an affiliate.

Other benefits of online quizzes include

  • To test knowledge after a computer-based training (CBT) course
  • Assess the needs of potential customers (site visitors)
  • Recommend products or services based on the player’s results or score
  • Visitors must subscribe to your email newsletter to unlock the quiz or results
  • Others

How to Add Interactive Quizzes to WordPress

Decide what type of quiz you want for your WordPress project before you do anything else. This should be easy if you run a well-established website or blog and know your audience. If it’s a new site, opt for something related to the site’s overall theme or the content of a specific post.

HD Quiz Plugin by Harmonic Design

For this tutorial, we’re going to use the powerful HD Quiz Maker by Harmonic Design. It’s a free plugin with over 6000 active installations and a high rating from users. Each quiz offers lots of individual options. Moreover, there’s no limit on how many quizzes you can have on a single site. There’s also a new Guttenberg HD Quiz block for adding your quizzes into the post editor.

If you’re new to WordPress, learn how to install and activate plugins here before continuing.

Log in to your WP Admin Area.

Install and activate HD Quiz by Harmonic Design.

Click HD Quiz => Quizzes from the Dashboard side menu.

You’re now at the HD Quiz main screen where you can add and test new quizzes.

Let’s add a brand-new quiz called exotic fruits.

Type Exotic Fruits into the add new quiz box, then press Enter to save.

Click on the saved quiz to add questions.

You’re now at the quiz edit screen. The options include—from top to bottom:

  • Quick return to quizzes link
  • Add new questions
  • Save quiz
  • Quiz shortcode for pages, posts, and widget-friendly sidebars
  • Saved questions box
  • Quiz settings

We’ll look at the additional and advanced settings in more detail later. For now, let’s add a few questions to our new quiz.

Click the blue + Add New Question tab.

Type your first question into the Enter question box.

Here’s how that looks for our test quiz.

There are several types of question to choose from, including image quizzes. The default—and most popular—is Multiple Choice: Text, so let’s use that for now.

You can type up to 10 possible answers, but we’ll add three to keep the guide short and simple.

Toggle the switch to Correct (green) next to the right answer.

Here’s how that looks.

Click the Save Question button (top right) when you’re done. You can also delete the question if you decide not to use it in the quiz.

Repeat the procedure above until you’ve entered all your questions and answers.

Click the BACK TO QUIZ button once your quiz is complete.

Now click on the quiz shortcode to copy it to your clipboard.

Your custom quiz is now ready to add to a WP post or page.

Go to Post => Add New or open an existing post.

Click inside the editor where you want to add your quiz.

Paste the shortcode you copied previously.

Here’s how that looks in the post edit window of the test site.

Click Preview => Preview in new Tab to see the results.

Below is how our basic quiz displays on the test site. The appearance may look slightly different between WordPress themes, but not by much.

The player clicks FINISH at the end of the quiz, and the program returns the score.

HD Quiz also shows which answers the user got right or wrong using green and red highlights.

The example above is just a simple WordPress quiz. You can also use images, or those where players need to type in the answers, and more. And don’t forget the advanced options and extra settings for creating unique quizzes. There are too many to cover here in detail, as needs and preferences differ greatly between site owners. Let’s go over some of the other options in brief.

HD Quiz Settings

The QUIZ SETTINGS screen has 4 tabs, I.E., Results, Marking, Timer, and Advanced.

#1 The Results tab has options for the following.

  • Enter the quiz pass percentage
  • Hide all questions after the player has completed the quiz
  • Add pass and fail text boxes using HTML editors

#2 The Marking tab has options for the following:

  • Highlight correct/incorrect answers on completion
  • Immediately mark answers as correct/incorrect
  • Always show incorrect answer text
  • Show correct answers on completion
  • Stop users from changing their answers

#3 The Timer tab has options for the following:

  • Countdown timer for the full quiz (in seconds)
  • Countdown timer for individual questions

#4 The Advanced tab has options for the following:

  • Enable/disable results sharing
  • Results location, i.e., above, or below quiz
  • Random question and answer order
  • Randomly grab a set number of questions from a question pool
  • WP Pagination (not recommended)

You can also rename your quiz from the Advanced tab if you want to.

About / Options screen

Go to HD Quiz => About / Options from the Dashboard side menu.

There are some handy settings on this screen, but all of them are optional. You don’t need anything here to create a quiz for your blog or website. Check out some of these advanced settings later if you’d like extra features and functionality for your quizzes.

Additional settings include:

  • Social sharing on sites like Facebook and Twitter
  • Rename/translate quiz-text and buttons
  • Allow Authors to add quizzes
  • Add advertising code to display ads after every 5 questions

That’s it. You can now engage your site visitors by easily creating custom quizzes for your WordPress blog or website. Have fun.

Want to Learn WordPress?

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