WordPress Forum vs Website Forum: Which One Is Better?
A forum is a place where users can ask questions and get guidance on topics of common interest. The two most popular forums are WordPress Forum and Website Forum, with the latter being more popular.
Each one of these forums is quite unique in the way it works and what kind of content it publishes. While both allow users to post and answer questions, only one of these forums is truly optimized for user-generated content.
To ensure you make the right decision and choose the right forum for your needs, let’s take a quick look at the difference between the two.
Features Of Both
When it comes to comparing the two most popular forums, you will notice a lot of similarities. Both allow users to post and answer questions, have multiple categories and tags to organize content, and are SEO-friendly.
The main difference between the two is how they allow users to post content and participate in conversations. For instance, let’s take a look at how each one of these forums handles new posts.
As we know, a forum is a place where users can post and answer questions. This means that if you’re a brand-new user to one of these forums and you want to ask a question, you’ll have to go through three steps before your post will be visible to everyone else:
- Search for the appropriate category or keyword;
- Post your question;
- Include keywords in the text. (This is called ‘SEO’. This is how Google and other search engines find and list websites relevant to what you’re searching for.)
In the case of a website forum, new content immediately becomes visible to all existing users. When a new user submits a new post, it will appear at the top of the page, as long as it doesn’t violate any of the site’s guidelines. (If it does, it will be removed and the author will receive a ‘time-out’ message.)
Now, when you think about creating content for a website, you’re probably going to choose the HTML (hypertext markup language) version of a website over the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor of WordPress. This is because the WYSIWYG editor makes it easy for you to post content directly from within the editing page, while using the HTML version will allow you to create complex formatting without fear of breaking the website when you post. (This is why many websites choose to use the HTML version rather than the WYSIWYG editor.)
If you want to use the WYSIWYG editor, you’ll have to go through an extensive learning curve before you can create any worthwhile content. For this reason, many people prefer to write their articles in HTML rather than through the WYSIWYG editor of WordPress. (This will also make the content more accessible to search engines and other people who access the content using the web.)
Learn From Existing Content
Another major difference between the two most popular forums is how they handle the educational content they publish. In the case of a website forum, all the content is readily available to be referenced and used by any existing user. (This is unlike a WordPress forum, where new users can’t really learn much unless they ask a question first and then try to answer it themselves.)
As a result, if you’re looking for an educational resource to learn more about SEO, email marketing or social media marketing, you can check out the Website Forum for WordPress.
On the other hand, a WordPress forum is more suitable for users who want to ask questions and get detailed answers. If you’re looking for an educational resource, you can choose the Wordpress Forum.
Organized Community
Even though both forums allow users to create content and ask questions, only one of these forums is truly organized around creating a community. (The other one is more of a collection of blogs where users can post and answer each other’s questions.)
This being said, many Wordpress forums have evolved into something more akin to a social network where users can create Buzz articles and tweet about each other’s content, making it more of a collection of blogs rather than a true forum.
If you’re looking for an organized space to ask questions and get answers, you can choose the Wordpress Forum.
Searchable
Last but not least, let’s take a quick look at how each of these forums handles search engine optimization (SEO). If you read through the How to SEO a Blog post, you’ll notice Google gives a lot of weight to the headers of a webpage, as well as the content itself. (In other words, the headers and content on a webpage will work together to determine how a webpage ranks on a search engine results page.)
Google looks at several factors when determining the order of a webpage’s results, including the headers, the content, the number of inbound links and the domain authority of the site. (Inbound links are simply the number of other websites that link to you. Having a lot of inbound links is an indication of the popularity of your site, while a high domain authority is closely related to the trustworthiness of your site.)
When it comes to comparing the two most popular forums, you’ll notice they are both SEO-friendly, but one of these forums is more suitable for SEO purposes than the other. When developing content for SEO purposes, you should look into moving to the Website Forum for WordPress.