How to Create a Product Recommendation Quiz in WordPress (Step by Step)

You've got products people would love, if they could work out which one is theirs. But a shopper looking at a page of cleansers, oils and moisturizers has to figure that out on their own, and a lot of them leave to "think about it" instead.

A product recommendation quiz does the figuring out for them. It asks a few questions they can answer without knowing anything about your products, like how their skin feels by midday, and then it shows them the two or three products that fit, with the price and an Add to cart button right there.

This guide walks you through planning a quiz around your products, building it in WordPress with Thrive Quiz Builder, and setting up a results page that shows real products from your WooCommerce store. I'll also share what Thrive learned when it ran a product quiz of its own, plus three store quizzes worth borrowing ideas from.

I built the demo on Fieldbloom, a skincare shop I made up for my beauty and cosmetics website tutorial. It isn't a real company, but its six products, its prices and its skin quiz all run on a real WordPress site with WooCommerce, so the screenshots show exactly what you'd see on yours.

What a Product Recommendation Quiz Is (And Why Fewer Choices Can Sell More)

A product recommendation quiz is a short quiz on an online store that asks shoppers about their needs, like their skin type or what they want their hair to do, and recommends the products that match their answers. Instead of browsing the whole catalog, the shopper answers a few questions and gets a short list they can add to their cart.

That short list is the whole point. In a well-known study from 2000, researchers Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper set up a jam tasting table in a grocery store. When the table had 24 jams, 60% of passing shoppers stopped to taste, but only 3% of them bought a jar. When it had 6 jams, fewer people stopped (40%), but about 30% of them bought one.

Later research found that a big choice doesn't always backfire, and it depends on the shopper and what they're buying. But when someone doesn't know which product they need, a short list can make it a lot easier to say yes.

And stores that run product quizzes see it in their sales. RevenueHunt, which makes a product quiz app, looked at more than 45 million quiz responses from over 20,000 stores in its June 2026 report:

Plan the Results Around Your Products First (Before You Open the Plugin)

The results are where the quiz sells, so I'd decide what each result shows before writing a single question.

Start with three to five results. Each one is a product or a small set of products, and each needs its own section on the results page, so more results means more to build and more to keep up to date. Fieldbloom has six products and three results, one for each skin type:

Then write questions shoppers can answer about themselves, not about your products. Someone with dry skin may not know what a cleansing balm does, but they know their skin feels tight after they wash their face. So Fieldbloom asks things like "How does your skin feel by midday?" and lets the answers do the matching.

Every answer needs to point to one of your results. If you write a question and can't decide which result an answer belongs to, that question probably isn't helping the quiz decide, so leave it out.

And decide what each result shows. For a small store, I'd show one to three products, a line on why they fit, and an Add to cart button. If your catalog is big, each result can send shoppers to a filtered category page instead, which is what Ulta does in the examples below.

How to Build a Product Recommendation Quiz in WordPress (The Way I Built Fieldbloom's)

Fieldbloom runs on WordPress with WooCommerce (free) for the shop, Thrive Quiz Builder for the quiz and Thrive Architect for the results page. If this is your first quiz, my guide on how to make a quiz in WordPress covers installing Thrive Quiz Builder, the templates and the quiz styles, so I'll stick to what's different about a product quiz here.

Step 1: Create a Category Quiz (One Result per Product Set)

In WordPress, go to Thrive Dashboard → Thrive Quiz Builder and click Add New. I started from the Build from scratch template and gave the quiz a name.

On the quiz's dashboard, click Change Type and choose Category. A Category quiz sorts people into results instead of giving them a score, which is exactly what a product quiz does: every result is a product or a set of products.

Then open Quiz settings and add one category for each result. Fieldbloom's are Dry skin, Combination skin and Sensitive skin. While you're there, choose Don't display feedback, so shoppers go straight from one question to the next.

Step 2: Write Questions Shoppers Can Answer About Themselves

Click Manage under Questions to open the question editor, then add your questions. Every answer has a Category dropdown, and that's where you point it to a result.

Fieldbloom's quiz has four questions with three answers each, one answer for each skin type. The first one is "How does your skin feel by midday?":

The other three ask what bothers the shopper most, how their skin feels right after washing, and what they wash with now. Each answer counts toward its result, and the shopper gets whichever result collects the most answers. If one question tells you more than the others, switch on Weights for it so it counts for more.

Then connect the questions in order, from Quiz Start down to the last one, so every shopper answers all four.

Step 3: Put Real Products on the Results Page (The Step That Sells)

Back on the quiz dashboard, click Manage under Results Page and edit the design. It opens in Thrive Architect.

The template shows the shopper's result with a shortcode, so leave that where it is. Under it, add a Dynamic Content element. A Results bar appears along the bottom of the editor with a tab for each result, and whatever you put under a tab only shows to shoppers who got that result.

Under each tab, I wrote one line on how to use the routine, with links to the products. Then I added the products themselves. Click Add Element, search for Shop and drag it in under that line. Shop is Thrive Architect's WooCommerce product grid, so it shows your real products, with their photos, their prices and an Add to cart button.

Out of the box, it shows your whole shop. To narrow it down, open Filter Products in the left panel and type the names of that result's products into Products. For Fieldbloom's Dry skin tab, that's the Meadow Cleansing Balm and the Rosehip Face Oil.

I changed a few more settings under Shop Options:

Then switch to the next tab and do the same. Combination skin got the balm and the Daily Oat Moisturizer, and Sensitive skin got The Starter Ritual. Click Save Work when you're done.

And this is what a shopper with dry skin sees at the end of the quiz:

Step 4 (Optional): Ask for an Email Before the Results, But Make It Worth It

Fieldbloom's quiz goes straight to the results, and for a store, that's where I'd start, because the results page is where the sale happens.

But you can ask for an email first. On the quiz dashboard, click Opt-in Gate under Add more pages, then design the form in Thrive Architect and connect it to your email service.

If you add one, give shoppers a reason to fill it in and a way past it. Olaplex's hair quiz (it's in the examples below) offers 15% off for an email and puts a Skip button right next to Continue. Fieldbloom could do the same with its 10% first-order code.

And keep in mind that shoppers already drop off without a gate. In RevenueHunt's data, 31% of people who start a quiz leave before they reach the results, so anything you put in front of them needs to be worth it. My WordPress quiz tutorial covers the gate in more detail, including how to tag subscribers by their answers so your emails can follow up.

Step 5: Put the Quiz Where Shoppers Are Deciding

A product quiz works best where people are trying to choose. Fieldbloom's has its own page, Skin Quiz, in the main menu, with one line above it: "Four quick questions, one routine that fits your skin." There's also a band on the homepage that sends people to it.

To add the quiz to a page, use the Thrive Quiz block in the WordPress editor, paste the quiz's shortcode, or drag in the Quiz element if you build the page with Thrive Architect.

Two more good spots are the top of your shop page and the product pages people compare the most, with a line like "Not sure which one is yours? Take the skin quiz."

Step 6: Take the Quiz as a Shopper (On Your Phone, Too)

Before you send anyone to it, take the quiz yourself while logged out (a private browser window does it), so you see exactly what shoppers see. Answer once for each result and check that every path lands on the right products. Then click Add to cart on one of them and make sure it ends up in the cart.

I did this for Fieldbloom with the combination skin answers. The results page showed the Meadow Cleansing Balm ($28) and the Daily Oat Moisturizer ($26), and Add to cart put the balm straight into the cart.

Then do it again on your phone. On Fieldbloom's, the two products sat side by side, and the longer names wrapped onto three lines, but everything still fit on the screen.

Once real shoppers start taking it, Thrive Quiz Builder's reports show you where people drop off, and my quiz tutorial walks through reading them.

What Thrive Learned From Its Own Product Quiz (Back in 2017)

Thrive ran a product quiz of its own in 2017, as an experiment. The team built a one-page site with nothing on it but a quiz, "What Valentine's Day Gift Should You Get Your Man," and sent Facebook ad traffic to it in the two weeks before Valentine's Day. The quiz had six results, and each one showed a different set of gifts with Amazon affiliate links, using the same Dynamic Content feature as step 3.

Here's how it went:

That's from people who were scrolling Facebook, not shopping for anything, so the quiz did its job.

But it didn't make money. Every visitor cost $0.70 in ads, the gifts cost between $5 and $50, and Amazon's commission on those is small. To break even, each sale would have needed to earn $29.54 in commission. The full case study goes through the numbers.

The quiz did what it was built to do. The trouble was where it sent people: to someone else's low-priced products, for a small cut of each sale. So the lesson Thrive took from it was to point a quiz at your own products, or at offers that pay more per sale. On your own store, the whole sale is yours.

Selling Courses or Services? The Same Quiz Works (Just Swap the Products)

A product quiz doesn't have to end on something you ship. If you sell courses, coaching or services, each result can recommend one of those instead.

The build is the same, with one change in step 3. Instead of the Shop element, put a short description and a button to that offer's sales page under each result. If your courses are in Thrive Apprentice, the button can go straight to the course. Or, if every result already has its own sales page, use URL Redirect to send people there.

For example, a business coach could ask about someone's revenue, how much time they have and how much help they want, then recommend a self-paced course, a group program or one-to-one coaching. These quiz funnel examples show how other businesses use quizzes to point people to the right offer.

Product Quizzes Worth Borrowing From (I Took Each One as a Shopper)

I took these three store quizzes in November 2026, answering the questions without signing up for anything, to see what each one does at the end.

Ulta Beauty's Haircare Quiz: A Filtered List for a Huge Catalog

Ulta's haircare quiz lets you start by hair goal or by product type. I went by goal, picked Boost Shine and Fight Frizz, then my hair type and the kind of product I wanted.

The results are a filtered list from Ulta's catalog: 115 shampoos for my answers, sorted by price. With a catalog that size, hand-picking products for every combination of answers wouldn't be practical, so a filtered list makes sense. But 115 is still a lot to choose from, and on a smaller store, a hand-picked set of two or three does more of the deciding for the shopper.

Olaplex's Hair Quiz: An Offer for Your Email and a Routine in One Click

Olaplex's hair quiz asks eight questions, and under some of them, a "Pro tip" helps you answer, like a strand test for working out your hair texture. One question even asks how many products you want: "Keep it simple (3-5 products)" or "I want the works (5+ products)."

Before the results, it asks for an email in exchange for 15% off and free shipping on a $50 order, with a Skip button right next to Continue.

I skipped it, and the results page still gave me a 15% code. Then it laid out a routine in steps (Treat, Cleanse and Style), with customer reviews next to the products and one Add all to bag button for the whole routine ($108). On a small store, a set like Fieldbloom's Starter Ritual does the same job: the whole routine is one product, so it's one click.

Warby Parker's Frame Quiz: Room for "I'm Not Sure"

Warby Parker's frame quiz has eight questions, and it shows you where you are ("3 of 8"). The answers are pictures of frames, you can pick as many as you like, and almost every question has a way out: "No preference," or "I'm not sure. Let's skip it."

That's worth copying in any product quiz. A shopper who can't answer a question shouldn't have to guess, because a guess can send them to the wrong products. Near the end, the quiz also offers to email your results to you for later, and you can skip that too.

Frequently Asked Questions About Product Recommendation Quizzes

If you're still deciding how to set yours up, these answers cover the questions that come up most.

The Results Page Is Where Shoppers Decide (So Plan It First)

The questions get a shopper to the end, but the results page is where they make up their mind. So plan the products for each result first, and make sure every result ends with those products, their prices and an Add to cart button.

Then take the quiz yourself, put it where shoppers are deciding, and let the reports show you where people drop off.

These will help with the rest:

Pick your results, choose the products for each one, and let the quiz point every shopper to theirs.