There are times you want to create polls on your website to get your visitors opinions on a specific matter. For example, you have released a book and want to know the readers opinion. You would create a poll like this:
What do you think about my recent book?
- It’s awesome
- I don’t like it
- Where can I find it?
Or if you want to find out about the demographics of your blog readers, you will create a poll like this:
What is your job?
- Teacher
- Police
- Firefighter
and so on.
Now, let’s find out how you can create polls like that using free plugin in WordPress.
How to create a poll in WordPress
We are going to use a plugin called YOP Poll which you can download freely on WordPress.org.
After installing and activating the plugin, you will notice that there is a new menu item on your dashboard.
Click on Add new to start creating your poll.
How to add questions and answers to the poll
Now, you are in the Question & Answers section, let’s start creating question and answers:
After entering your question and answers using the form above, let’s go to the options tab to finalize your poll’s settings. From here, you can change the button’s text and other options such as start date, end date and whether you want to use captcha or not (which I think is a very good setting).
When you are done setting up the poll, click on publish to make it live.
Now, if you go to YOP Poll->All polls, you will see your newly created poll there. To display it on your posts, simply click on the code button to get the shortcode:
Now you can paste the shortcode anywhere you need to poll to display. For example, I’ll create a new post and paste the shortcode. Here is the result:
So, that’s how you create a poll in WordPress. This plugin is very useful for simple poll creation. If you need something more sophisticated such as multiple step polls, you should find a more advanced tool.