Why a FAQ?
An FAQ provides answers to questions that you are frequently asked. Well that’s how it’s supposed to work. The idea is that having an FAQ can reduce the need to respond to individual enquiries over and over again.
As your site and your following grows you’ll spend more and more time interacting with new people who maybe just want to find out a bit more about you and what you do. Having a FAQ in place lets them find the information themselves even before they may be prepared to contact you. It reduces your workload and makes for a good experience for people just discovering your site.
Another advantage is that you can put links in your FAQ answers to topics that you’ve already written about then, when you analyse your traffic, look at how many referrals come from your FAQ page. This lets you know what is and isn’t working and the types of questions people want answers to.
Why an FAQ plugin and not just a hand-crafted resources page?
Probably the best reason is that, over time, your FAQ really becomes a resources page and will likely grow have hundreds of entries. That’s a lot of manual work to maintain. An FAQ plugin reduces your effort by allowing you to focus on just the question and answer and much less on how it is presented.
Let’s see what is available
I started out at WPBeginner and found their “How to Add a Frequently Asked Questions – FAQs section in WordPress” post and followed along the installation and configuration of the Quick and Easy FAQs plug-in. I added a few questions and answers to see it in action. It works entirely as advertised but there was one feature I wanted out-of-the-box; the ability to easily sort the FAQ questions to lead the reader through a process.
OK, to clarify, I wasn’t looking for a FAQ in the usual sense, but to find a way to provide a resource page of quick answers in some structured form without hand-crafting every entry. The idea was to lead the reader as they learned new concepts but also provide the ability to jump in and quickly find answers that could provide the basics then perhaps link to an in depth article.
After reading through the support forum for Quick and Easy FAQs, I realised that there hadn’t been many questions answered recently, that the last plug-in update had been 2 years ago, and compatibility testing had stopped at 4.4.11. I abandoned any more effort.
Looking for a better alternative
Next was a search at wordpress.org for “faq plugin” that returned this page. First on the list was Arconix FAQ with over 10,000 active installs. This plug-in is being actively developed and is up to date as of this writing. A brief review of the documentation and I was quickly on my way to deleting the Quick and Easy FAQ plug-in and installing the Arconix FAQ plug-in.
After activating the plug-in the first surprise was that all the Quick and Easy FAQ entries I’d made earlier were still there even though I’d deleted the previous plug-in. No copy/paste required. That just felt like a big win right there.
The only other change required was to go to my resources page and change the short code from “[faqs]” to “[faq]”. My resource list was back in business, albeit without groups which didn’t come across from the previous plug-in.
Adventures with FAQ layout
Next to see if I could control the layout. This proved to be super easy and was well documented except for one fact about displaying FAQ Groups. If you don’t care about the order of your groups a simple short code like:
[faq orderby=menu_order order=ASC style=accordion]
will do the trick and you’re done. The “orderby=menu_order” clause is using the Post Attributes -> Order value that you set when creating each FAQ.
On the other hand, if you want a resources page that displays groups of FAQs in a certain order you can create multiple short codes, one for each group. It’s a bit more work but you only need to set this up once initially, and then not forget to add a new short code whenever you create a new group.
[faq orderby=menu_order order=ASC style=accordion group=wordpress] [faq orderby=menu_order order=ASC style=accordion group=hosting] [faq orderby=menu_order order=ASC style=accordion group=online-safety]
Note the last short code group name. When displaying a group you are actually supplying the group slug to the argument to the short code. This is mentioned in the plugin documentation right at the bottom of the page but I didn’t notice it at first. If you use a Group name with spaces or you’ve changed the Group name without changing the slug, you’ll need to use the hyphenated slug to get your group to display. You can see the Group slug names under FAQ -> Groups.
To make sorting your FAQ questions easier over the long term you can set the Post attributes -> Order to any arbitrary number and they don’t have to be consecutive. So, for example, you could start numbering at 1000 and skip 10 each time. This way you leave gaps to insert later FAQs without having to reorder the existing ones.
You could even break your order number up into group blocks of 1000 so that your FAQs order logically even when you don’t specify a Group name.
Results
This experiment proved successful so I’ve incorporated it on my small business technology website.