About this plugin
wAnswers turns your WordPress site into a structured community Q&A platform. Every question is a WordPress post with its own canonical URL, server-rendered HTML, and complete QAPage JSON-LD schema – the exact format Google uses to surface Q&A content in rich snippets, People Also Ask boxes, and AI Overviews.
No JavaScript rendering. No iframe embeds. No third-party dependencies.
No jQuery.
dev/questions/
Why wAnswers Is Different: SEO & GEO First
Most Q&A plugins render everything via a single shortcode page – one URL, no per-question structured data, effectively invisible to crawlers. wAnswers works the opposite way.
Every question gets its own permanent URL ( /questions/my-question/ ). Every page ships with the structured data Google and AI search engines need to surface your content in search results, rich snippets, and AI citations.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)
AI search engines like Perplexity, ChatGPT Browse, and Google AI Overviews favour content with clear Q&A structure, explicit authorship, date signals, topic tagging, and Speakable content markers. wAnswers outputs all of these automatically on every question page.
Core Q&A Features
- Ask questions with a title and optional body text
- Categorise questions by topic (custom taxonomy with live AJAX filter)
- Answer questions inline with no page reload
- Accept an answer (question author or admin only)
- Threaded replies on answers – one level deep
- Sort questions: Newest, Top Voted, Most Answered, Unanswered
- Filter by topic with instant AJAX
- Live search within the feed
- Load-more pagination – no full page reloads
- Edit questions and answers within a 1-hour window
- Delete your own questions and answers
Voting & Scoring
- Upvote and downvote questions and answers
- Cannot vote on your own posts
- Lifetime vote tracking that persists across leaderboard resets
- Automatic backfill for users who existed before vote tracking was added
Leaderboard
- Four tabs: Top Score, Most Questions, Most Answers, Most Accepted
- Five position options: none, above feed, below feed, sidebar left, sidebar right
- Optional sticky sidebar
- Configurable max users shown (3 to 50)
- Transient-cached and busted on every vote, answer, and reset
User Profiles
- Unique profile URLs at /questions/author/username/
- Gravatar support with letter-initial fallback
- Lifetime score, coloured upvote and downvote counts
- 10 badges across 4 tiers: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Diamond
- SVG 12-month activity chart
- Recent questions and answers list
- Topic badge links navigate to the filtered tag archive
Email Notifications & Weekly Digest
- Notifies question author when a new answer is posted
- Notifies answer author when a reply is posted
- Weekly digest email via WP-Cron on a configurable day
- Token-based one-click unsubscribe – no login required
- Admin button to send digest immediately for testing
- Configurable maximum recipients per send
Settings & Customisation
- Homepage Mode – serve Q&A at your site root with automatic 301 redirect from /questions/
- Admin-editable heading, subtitle, SEO title, and meta description for the archive page
- Questions per page, answers per page, max answers per question page
- Minimum and maximum content length validation
- Rate limiting per user for questions, answers, and votes
- Custom CSS field – override plugin styles without editing files
- Question moderation mode – hold new questions for admin approval
- Noindex shortcode pages to prevent duplicate content with the CPT archive
- Footer credit toggle – shown by default, completely optional and freely removable
- Full compatibility with Yoast SEO and RankMath
SEO & GEO Schema
- QAPage JSON-LD on every single question page
- Question and Answer entities with author, dates, and vote counts
- acceptedAnswer marked in schema when set
- BreadcrumbList on single, archive, and taxonomy pages
- CollectionPage schema on archive and topic pages
- Organization schema sitewide for brand entity recognition
- WebSite and SearchAction for Google Sitelinks Searchbox eligibility
- Speakable specification on question pages – AI and voice citation signal
- Open Graph and Twitter Card meta on every question page
- Explicit canonical link on every page type
- dateModified updated on every edit, answer, and reply
- Microdata itemscope and itemprop on question cards in the feed
Shortcodes
[wanswers_qa] – Embed the full Q&A feed on any page.
[wanswers_leaderboard] – Embed a standalone leaderboard on any page.
[wanswers_leaderboard limit=”5″] – Show top 5 users per tab (default is 10).
No External Dependencies
The plugin JavaScript is vanilla JS with no jQuery requirement. Styles are self-contained with no external CDN requests. Everything runs on your server.
External services
Gravatar
This plugin uses the Gravatar service to display user profile images on member profile pages. When a user visits a member profile page, the plugin requests an avatar image from Gravatar based on the member’s email address (hashed with MD5).
Data sent: an MD5 hash of the user’s email address, included in the image URL.
When: each time a member profile page is loaded.
Service provider: Automattic Inc.
com/tos/
com/privacy/