How to collect readers feedback on your WordPress site

Giving your readers an option to react to your posts not only increases the user engagement but also acts a feedback mechanism for your content and writing skills. In this post, we will see how to add post reactions in WordPress.

Step 1 – Install and activate the Reaction Buttons plugin by Jakob Lenfers either directly from your WordPress dashboard or through FTP.

Step 2 – Once the plugin is activated, visit Settings –> Reaction Buttons to configure the plugin settings.

Step 3 – The first option allows you to choose whether to show reaction buttons or not. Make sure it remains checked.

NOTE: If it is unchecked, the reactions won’t show up on your posts even if the plugin is active.

Step 4 – In the next option, you can choose where you want the reaction options to appear on your posts – above the post, below the posts or anywhere in between using shortcodes.

Step 5 – You can also change the tagline appearing before the reaction options to something more interesting.

Step 6 – Moreover, you can feel free to edit the labels of the reaction buttons. The default buttons are Awesome, Interesting, Useful, Boring, Sucks.

Step 7 – There are various other options too for you to play around with by tweaking the plugin settings. You can also control reactions spam, show percentage or graphs, use counter, choose page types, exclude categories, etc.

Advanced Customization (Not recommended for normal users)

Step 8 – Though these buttons are pre-styled, sometimes it may not match your site’s color scheme. In that case, you can disable the plugin’s default CSS.

Step 9 –  You can then click on the link to the plugin’s reaction_buttons.css stylesheet to copy the elements you want to customize.

Step 10 – Once you have modified the stylesheet according to your requirements, you can paste it into your theme’s stylesheet directly or use WordPress 4.7 Customizer’s Additional CSS feature to paste your CSS.

Thus I hope this article helped you in learning how to add post reaction to your WordPress site. You may also want to check out my post on how to add comment likes & dislikes in WordPress.