Top Pick: Sweet Date WordPress theme
NEW in 2020: check out the best dating WordPress theme on ThemeForest – SWEET DATE
- Over 8000+ happy users
- Social login features (Facebook / Twitter)
- BuddyPress integration – Unique quick profile navigation
- WooCommerce and Membership ready
- Elementor and Slider Revolution compatibility
- 40+ different page templates and unlimited layout and color combinations
For quality support and excellent features and design quality our top recommendation for creating a dating website is Sweet Date WordPress theme.
Get Sweet Date WordPress Theme
How to build a dating site with WordPress?
If you are in a relationship, you must have heard “Are you dating this guy?”
The trend of not defining the relationship is more common nowadays and “dating” has been the solution for hooking up to flirting and being in exclusive relation with each other.
When you unbox the word “dating”, It is very difficult to explain.
In this article, we’re going to discuss the 3 ways to create a dating website using WordPress.
The first step in building a robust and easy to use dating platform is to choose a good performance hosting service making sure the pages load fast and your content and code is secure. In our opinion, one of the best quality hosts currently on the market in terms of value / quality ratio is the company called Siteground. They offer special packages for WordPress site owners and focus on expert support and top-performance server configurations. The user control panel is very easy to use and offers a lot of extra features most hosts don’t have – like a free 1-click SSL certificate which we recommend using for a dating website where you will be providing users with profiles and logins details.
What is the difference between dating and dating someone?
Dating means you are going on dates, you are meeting people and spending time with them whereas Dating someone means you are meeting the specific person, with purpose on regular basis.
How is a dating site different to Social Networking sites?
In Social Networking site you don’t get the people of your specific choice to date with you. For example: If you wish to date a girl of height 5’5”, it is difficult to return the specific result of your choice. Whereas you can easily find the people of your choice in a dating site.
Social Networking sites don’t charge you a single penny to create the account but dating site charge dollars to get through.
Some interesting facts about the dating industry
- 20-40 millions American have used online dating service
- 33% of online daters forms a relationship
- Men who report income more than $250,000, received 156% more e-mail than those with $50,000.
These were some of the interesting facts about the dating.
So, you can clearly see how people are going crazy in online dating.
The question arises…
How to create the dating website using WordPress?
WordPress is the primary platform(say base) for building the dating sites with ease and comfort.
WordPress now powers more than 30% of websites. WordPress is SEO friendly platform, where your site can get easily indexed by search engines.
There are lots of benefits to using WordPress.
WordPress is not only the solution for creating an online dating website. There are lists of plugins that makes your website completely a dating website.
So, here are the 3 ways to create dating website using WordPress.
BuddyPress:
BuddyPress is a powerful community plugin for WordPress. This plugin allows you to create your own community. It includes the features like creating user profiles, notifications, groups, activity and everything that online community expects.
So we discuss the features that turn your website into a dating website.
Features
- Profiles: BuddyPress profile component allow you to create the types of profile field that is helpful to your community. Each member that registers can upload their avatar, edit their information and personalize their account setting.It also provides the personalized front-end dashboard that allows you to see your private messages, notifications, activity, group notifications, etc.
- Setting: When the user gets logged in, the user has access to their own setting page where various option can be configured.
The list of sub pages available in setting area by default are:
- Current password area
- lost your password? link
- Account email input box
- Change password
- Save changes button
Similarly, the following list of events triggers the notification:
- Activity (includes mentions(eg. @rarathemes)
- Messages
- Friends( if they send a friend request or accept friend request)
- Related to group
- Delete account(warning and checkbox)
- Groups: If enabled by admin, any member can create the group. It allows the user to create micro-communities.
- Activity Streams: It is provided for members and groups. The custom component is also included in Activity Streams that means any sort of data can be tracked.
- Notifications: Notification is sent to individual users if someone notifies them. You are able to enable/disable the emails when new notification is received.
- Private Messaging
- Paid Membership using add-ons and lot more
After all, by using these features you can make your own online dating site.
Not made specifically for online dating. However, it can be used for making online dating sites.
Here is the quick glance of this plugin
| Pros | Cons |
| ✔ Widely used plugin for social networking. | ❌ No any dating specific features(like near me, date tracker, etc) |
| ✔ Customizable Profile | ❌ Mobile dating app should be created manually. |
| ✔ Private Messaging | ❌ Many add-ons required which may turn out to be expensive. |
| ❌ Lifetime free support not available. |
After all, we can say that BuddyPress is not specifically for Dating sites. It solely focuses on social networking.
Rencontre – Dating plugin
Rencontre is the next dating plugin for WordPress. It’s easy to install and run. The plugin is not that good as expected. Here are some of the features of this plugin.
Features
- Private messaging between the user
- Sending Emoji and contact request
- Photo import from Facebook account
- unlimited numbers of members
- Multilingual
- Blacklist by email
- Advanced search option
- Editable and customizable profile
- login required to access functionality
- Compatible with WooCommerce gateways.
| I’ve not mentioned the video chat with member features above. There are lot of fields where this plugin needs improvement. UX design is the peak of the problem that needs to be solved as soon as possible. Many small things have not been considered while making these plugin. There is no proper use of hook.The plugin is not that bad but such minor mistakes are really making it down. To be honest, It is complicated to follow. |
So, its user’s responsibility to choose the great plugin.
| Pros | Cons |
| ✔ Advanced Search Option | ❌ Support forum not active |
| ✔ Search on map based on geolocation. | ❌Mobile dating app should be manually created |
| ✔ Member can Blacklist the E-mails or IP | ❌User experience not good as it should be.. |
| ✔ Compatible with WooCommerce Gateways. | ❌ Life time free support not available. |
Third one, final way to create dating website using WordPress is, WPDating.
WP Dating Plugin
WP Dating is a dating software, that offers a WordPress Dating plugin. It is very easy to use and solves every problem related to modern dating. This WordPress Dating Plugin is a peculiar dating software which operates on SEO friendly WordPress platform.
WPDating member can access up-to 80 premium WordPress themes. WPDating has its Mobile Dating App for Android and iPhone users. You can search for it in Google Play Store and App store.
Features
- Advanced Search Option: There is an advanced search option to find more refined results as an additional option. Additional options allow you to choose whether you are seeking for friendship, long-term relation, dating, etc.
- Near Me: This option is always important for a dating website. People are always willing to know who is nearby to hangout. WPDating uses Google Geo-targeting and users IP address to find people nearby.
- Meet Me: Meet me option make the user sure whether they can meet each other or not. The user can click on the profile picture and answer yes or no if they want to meet that user.
- Trending: Members can see which profile have the maximum number of friends, winks, flirts and favorites. This help other member knows who is getting more attention. Gender filter option is available for this option.
- Chat Widget: Members can chat with each other via AJAX chat module that is located in the sidebar. It can be put on the right or left sidebar area.
- Media Streaming: Dating site member can upload the photos, videos, Audio files, Gallery to their profile. Every media items are streamed from the user’s profile page.
- Online tracker: Members can see who is currently logged in and start chatting with each other. Gender filter option is available.
- User’s Privacy: It allows the user to set their own privacy whether to allow friends or everyone.
- Integrated Blog: Users are allowed to write the blog post and the posts will be available on their profile. Users have full control over their blogs.
- Spam control: It filters out spam words in emails. You can set your own spamming words like (millions, Bank Accounts, etc)
- PayPal subscription and recurring payments:
The user can use the payment gateways like PayPal, PayPal Pro, Stripe, iDeal, etc.
Here is the quick view of the Pros and Cons of this theme:
| Pros | Cons |
| ✔Mobile dating app available for iOS and android. | ❌ Tons of feature that may be bulgy for some users. |
| ✔Dating specific features(for example: flirting,chat,date tracker, near me ,etc) | ❌Heavier than other plugins[20 mb] |
| ✔ Multiple payment gateway integration(Paypal,iDeal,stripe,etc) | |
| ✔ Free lifetime support | |
| ✔ Advanced Search Option and Private chat. |
The price of WPDating is affordable considering the advantages and compared to other competitor software. It gives you all the features at very low rates.
Lifetime free support and unlimited features make your dating site highly customizable.
Conclusion
From the above facts discussed, let’s try to conclude it based on my opinion.
Let’s move to BuddyPress first. BuddyPress is free and famous in the WordPress Community. It might not be completely free. To make the best use of BuddyPress, you need add-ons(which is premium). It has very good features. You might use BuddyPress to create your own dating site though BuddyPress is not specifically meant for dating sites.
Rencontre, too is a great plugin. It has a lot of good features to offer. I believe you might have read the Pros and cons of rencontre above. It needs more improvement.
Remains, WPDating, a dating plugin, which is a good plugin- only for dating with lots of feature.
There are dating software in PHP ( not in WordPress ) like advandate, skadate, Dating Pro and lots of other. You can see their pricing and the features they give you. It’s very expensive compared to above listed plugins.
If you have some bucks, and you are willing to spend it, you might try BuddyPress first.
In case, if you find BuddyPress difficult then you have other options too.
WP Dating and Rencontre are alternative to BuddyPress. You can install Rencontre or try the demo of WPDating before purchasing them. The choice is all yours!