WordPress accordion plugins can help you improve the reading experience on your site, especially for users on mobile devices.
Below we’ll cover what an accordion is, what the best WordPress plugins for adding accordions to a WordPress website are, and each plugin’s ideal use case.
Why Use a WordPress Accordion Plugin
An accordion is a type of menu that displays headers stacked on top of one another. Readers can click on one of these headers to reveal hidden content. This web design element can break down longform or complex pages into digestible, bite-sized chunks and reduce how much a user has to scroll, especially on mobile devices.
It’s commonly used for FAQ sections on a website or product page. For example, you can often find an accordion menu at the bottom of a WordPress plugin landing page.
Despite popular misconceptions, hidden content behind an accordion is indexed like any other visible content by search engines, according to John Mueller in a Google Webmaster hangout. So accordions do not negatively impact your SEO.
Now that we understand the benefits of accordions, it’s easy to understand why people add them to their website. However, coding an accordion can be difficult since it requires HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
If you don’t have the technical experience or time to create an accordion from scratch, you can use a plugin.The plugins below will enable you to easily and quickly add this web design feature to your WordPress site.
WordPress Accordion Plugins
- Easy Accordion
- Accordion FAQ
- Accordion
- Accordion Blocks
- Lightweight Accordion
- Accordion and Accordion Slider
- Iks Menu
- Bellows Accordion Menu
- Accordion FAQ WordPress Plugin
- Ultimate Searchable Accordion
1. Easy Accordion
Best for: Customization
Easy Accordion is a freemium WordPress accordion plugin that’s also one of the best FAQ plugins. With the free version, you can create unlimited accordions, select an activator event (click or mouse over), add and customize icons, and change the title, description, background color, and margin of your accordions. For even more control over the look of your accordions, you can add custom CSS to override the default styles.
The premium version offers even more customization and design options, including:
- 16+ themes
- 14+ icon style sets
- 25+ animation effects
- 840+ Google Fonts
Here’s a video tutorial of how to get started with the Easy Accordion plugin:
2. Accordion FAQ
Best for: Drag-and-drop editing
Accordion FAQ is another freemium WordPress plugin for creating accordions. Built on Bootstrap, this plugin enables you to make responsive accordion menus and customize them with a drag-and-drop builder. You can further customize their look by adding custom CSS in the plugin settings.
The premium version of Accordion FAQ is packed with more features, including eight design templates, 12 icon sets, and 30 animation effects for creating more unique menus.
3. Accordion
Best for: Search-enabled accordions
Accordion is the most downloaded WordPress accordion plugin in the official plugin directory. With the free version, you can display an accordion anywhere on your site via a shortcode and customize the accordion icons, header, content, and container. The plugin is also built with jQuery so the accordions are responsive on any device.
With the premium version, you can create more advanced accordions by adding a search feature, setting a custom background image, tracking clicks, and more.
4. Accordion Blocks
Best for: Gutenberg editor
Accordion Blocks is a simple free accordion plugin for WordPress. Once the plugin is installed and activated, you’ll see a Gutenberg block for adding accordion dropdown menus to your pages. Each accordion will have a few settings so you can set your accordions to automatically close when opening another item or set it to open automatically when the page loads, for example.
You can also add up to eight CSS classes to customize the look and behavior of each accordion menu. This plugin is therefore a great option for site owners who are comfortable with the Gutenberg editor as well as HTML and CSS.
5. Lightweight Accordion
Best for: Load time
Lightweight Accordion is another free option for adding accordions to your WordPress site. With this plugin, you can display accordions on your site by using shortcodes or a Gutenberg block. If you opt to use shortcodes, you can control whether the accordion opens on load, what heading level the title is, whether it has a border, and whether it’s set to FAQ, among other options.
This plugin doesn’t use JavaScript and is incredibly lightweight, making it ideal for optimizing page load times.
6. Accordion and Accordion Slider
Best for: Touch-enabled image accordions
The free Accordion and Accordion slider plugin enables you to create responsive accordion sliders featuring images.
What sets this plugin apart from other WordPress accordion plugins is that it creates touch-enabled accordions. Meaning, they support touch swipe and tap gestures on mobile devices and mouse drag on desktops. That way, you can display a unique image gallery and users can click to reveal the full image or keep swiping to the right.
7. Iks Menu
Best for: Sidebar accordion menus
Iks Menu is a freemium WordPress accordion plugin designed for creating custom sidebar accordion menus. These menus can be created using any custom menu or taxonomy, whether it’s categories, post tags, WooCommerce product categories, or another custom taxonomy. You can customize the color, font, margin, padding, height, and width of any accordion and display them using a WordPress widget, shortcode, or PHP code.
The premium version offers more skins, icons, and animation effects to customize the appearance of your accordion menus.
8. Bellows Accordion Menu
Best for: Auto-generating accordion menus
Bellows Accordion Menu is also a freemium WordPress plugin for creating accordions with icons, images, widgets, custom content, and more. You can customize and preview accordion menus via the WordPress Customizer, changing the toggle icons, text and background colors, padding, and fonts.
What’s unique about Bellows Pro is that it allows you to either build accordions manually in the plugin settings or auto-generate them based on post or taxonomy hierarchies. This can save you time, especially if you run a large website with lots of posts and pages.
9. Accordion FAQ WordPress Plugin
Best for: Accordion style options
Accordion FAQ WordPress plugin is a premium plugin that can be used as a standalone accordion plugin or an add-on to Elementor or WPBakery Page Builder. Its key features include unlimited color schemes, pagination, and drag-and-drop ordering of accordion elements.
With over 22 tab designs, this plugin offers the most style options of any WordPress accordion plugin on the list.
10. Ultimate Searchable Accordion
Best for: Site owners using WPBakery Page Builder
Ultimate Searchable Accordion is a premium tool that enables you to create responsive and searchable accordion menus. You can select from six color schemes and 14 animation effects to make the menu even more attractive and interactive.
Unlike other plugins on this list, Ultimate Searchable Accordion is a premium add-on for the WPBakery Page Builder plugin. So it’s best for site owners who are already using the page builder and want to extend its power.
Picking Your WordPress Accordion Plugin
Accordions can help you maximize space on your web pages while improving the reading experience. Using any of the WordPress accordion plugins above will allow you to reap the benefits of incorporating accordions into your web design, without having to code them from scratch.
