Want to create a WordPress quiz for your readers? Quizzes can help make your website more engaging for your audience and you’ll also learn more about the demographics of your readers. So whether you use them for fun or business, they’re a powerful weapon in your WordPress arsenal.
In this post, I’m going to give you a detailed tutorial on how you can create a WordPress quiz using a free plugin called Quiz Cat.
Let’s do it!
How to create a WordPress quiz with Quiz Cat 🐱
Quiz Cat is a free plugin with a premium version that offers even more functionality. I chose to use Quiz Cat for this tutorial because:
- The free version has enough functionality to be helpful
- It’s responsive, which means it works well on both desktop and mobile
- It’s really easy to use – even for beginners
- You can display different results pages depending on how people answer your quiz
Put that all together and it’s the best tool I’ve found to create a WordPress quiz for free.
The only downside is that, in the free version, you can’t create a true personality quiz. That is, you can only create a quiz where each question has just one correct answer. If you want to create more open quizzes, you’ll need the pro version. Or, you can always create a WordPress poll if you just need to ask a single open-ended question.
Here’s how to use Quiz Cat to create a WordPress quiz:
Step 1: Install and activate Quiz Cat
Quiz Cat is free and listed at the WordPress.org plugin directory. To get started, you can install the plugin directly from your WordPress dashboard.
Go to Plugins –> Add New Plugin. Then use the search window to type in “quiz cat.” Once the results populate, click on Install Now.
Wait a few seconds while WordPress does its thing and when the button text changes to Activate, click it again.
Step 2: Add new quiz
When you click on the Quiz Cat link in your dashboard, you’ll be able to add a new quiz in two ways. Both are very straightforward:
That will open up a popup window where it’ll ask you to choose your quiz type, but in reality, the only option in the free version of the plugin is Multiple Choice. The other two are only accessible if you upgrade.
Step 3: Create your first quiz
After you select Multiple Choice in the previous popup window, you’ll be brought into the quiz interface, which you’ll immediately notice is fairly simplistic.
To get started, give your quiz a title and a description. You can also add an image to the description if you’d like:
If you have an unstable internet connection you can hit Save at the bottom after you do this. This is optional though, because whatever you type in here will be automatically saved as you move onto the next step.
Step 4: Add your questions and answers
Next up, find that top row menu with the three tabs (setup, questions, results) and click on 2. Questions.
Within this tab, you’ll be greeted with a placeholder Question 1. All you need to do is click on it. That will open up the edit screen where you can tweak the question text.
The rest is fairly self-explanatory:
First, enter your question text. You can also add an image as part of the question.
Then, enter the Correct answer. If a user chooses this answer, they will get 1 point.
After that, you can enter as many Wrong answers as you’d like. To add a new wrong answer, just click the +New Answer button:
Once you’ve finished your first question, you can either click the X in the top right corner or hit Esc on your keyboard. That will bring you back to the Questions interface.
Here you can add new questions and repeat the process for as many questions as you’d like by hitting the +New Question button:
Step 5: Add your results
After finishing up your questions, you need to add the results your quiz-takers will see at the end of the quiz. Just click on the next tab over – 3. Results – to access them. As I mentioned earlier, you can add different results based on how the person answered the quiz.
Because each correct answer is worth 1 point, the default Results tab will cover all possible results. So if you have a quiz with 4 questions, the default results page covers every score from 0-4 points.
But what if you want to show one “results” page to people who answered 3-4 questions correctly, and another to keep who only answered 0-2 questions correctly? No problem! Just click the +New Result button to add as many different “results” pages as you’d like:
Each time you add a new “results” page, Quiz Cat will automatically adjust the number of points associated with each “results” page to divide things up equally:
The one downside here is that you can’t manually decide the point ranges.
For example, in the screenshot above, because I added 4 questions and 3 results, it automatically made the middle result in the 2-3 points range. But let’s say I wanted to have the WordPress Pro result be 3-4 points instead, there isn’t an option to do that. It’s a minor thing, but just pointing it out.
In case you accidentally add a result out of order, you can also re-arrange them as needed by dragging and dropping.
Step 6: Preview your quiz
Once you’ve added all of the “results” pages that you want, you can preview your quiz by clicking on the Save & Preview button on the bottom left of the quiz interface:
You’ll first see your quiz landing page. And if you want to see the quiz in action, you can take it yourself to make sure everything works:
If you get the answer correct – which I hope you will since you’re the one who designed the quiz 😅 – you’ll see this:
If you want to see what the wrong answer looks like:
Once you’re happy with how everything looks, you’re ready to embed your quiz on your live site!
Step 7: Embed your new WordPress quiz
To display your quiz on the front-end, all you need to do is paste the shortcode wherever you want your quiz to appear. To find your shortcode, you can go back to the first tab – 1. Setup – and you’ll see it on the bottom left:
Highlight the code and then copy it. If you’re using a Mac it’s Command + C on your keyboard. If you’re on a PC, it’s Ctrl + C.
Then, just go into whichever page or post you’d like to add the quiz to.
Once you’re inside the page or post, click the + button to add a new block and search for the Shortcode block:
Then paste the shortcode you copied into the block.
On Mac, that’s Command + V, and on PC it’s Ctrl + V.
You can then hit the toggle button on the top right to open up the preview options and click on Preview in new tab to see what it’ll look like. Please note that the toggle button may look slightly different depending on what theme you’re using, but it’ll be in the same general area that you see below:
Finally, if everything looks good, then go back into your page or post and smash that Publish button to go live:
What about creating a BuzzFeed style personality quiz?
Unfortunately, if you want to create a true BuzzFeed style WordPress quiz, you’ll need to upgrade to the pro version of Quiz Cat which starts from $69 per year. You’ll also be able to customize the color schemes of your quizzes to better match your own branding. Plus you’ll get access to social sharing buttons to help your quiz go viral.
But if you don’t care about BuzzFeed personality quizzes, the free version should work for all of the other situations in which you need to create a WordPress quiz.
Wrapping things up 🏁
Quiz Cat provides a simple way to create a WordPress quiz, even if you don’t know a single line of code. The plugin is fairly straightforward, so that, in combination with my tutorial, should mean you won’t run into any issues setting up your quiz.
If you find Quiz Cat to be too simple for you and you want a more robust option that lets you create different types of questions like multiple answer checkboxes, drop down choices, short answers, etc then check out HD Quiz. It also comes in a free version with an optional premium upgrade, but it’s slightly less beginner friendly. Hence why I chose to do this tutorial with Quiz Cat.
Happy quizzing!
If you need any additional help, leave a comment and I’ll do my best to assist.
FREE GUIDE
4 Essential Steps to Speed Up Your WordPress Website
Follow the simple steps in our 4-part mini series and reduce your loading times by 50-80%. 🚀
Thanks for pointing this out! Mostly these type of plugins are premium. I’ll try this plugin with my site