Every social feed you scroll is really just a mix of updates from people you’ve connected with. On a BuddyPress community, that connection layer doesn’t build itself, members need help finding each other, which is what a friends-and-follow suggestions plugin like BuddyPress Friend & Follow Suggestion is for.
Friends vs. followers isn’t just semantics
A friend connection is mutual, both people have to accept it, and it implies a closer, two-way relationship. A follow is one-directional, and platforms handle the distinction differently: Facebook auto-follows anyone you friend, Instagram is follow-only with no separate friend tier, and LinkedIn reserves following for companies and public figures. Which model fits your community depends on what kind of interaction you’re trying to encourage, friend requests work better for peer communities, while follow-only suits communities built around a smaller number of prominent members or creators.
Also read: GIF Plugin: Why You Should Add to Your Community Website?
Why suggestions matter, not just the connection feature itself
Having a friend/follow system is one thing. Getting members to actually use it is another, and that’s where suggestions come in.
It gets new members moving faster
A member who joins and sees an empty feed usually doesn’t come back. Surfacing relevant people to connect with immediately gives them a reason to.
It drives the interactions that keep a community alive
Comments, likes, and replies mostly happen between people who are already connected. More connections, sourced automatically instead of left to chance, means more of that baseline activity.
It surfaces people members wouldn’t have found on their own
Left to search alone, most members only connect with people they already know. Suggestions based on shared profile data, work history, interests, location, surface people they’d never have searched for directly.
Also read: BuddyPress Search Plugin Review 2026
What BuddyPress Friend & Follow Suggestion actually does
The current version goes further than a basic “people you may know” widget. It runs a match-scoring engine that weights different profile fields against each other, and shows members why a suggestion was made, shared work history, similar interests, overlapping location, whatever criteria you’ve configured.
- Swipe-card interface, members can accept or dismiss suggested connections with a swipe, similar to a dating app.
- Widgets, a Gutenberg block, and eight shortcodes for placing suggestions anywhere on the site.
- Match-percentage display in each profile header, showing how closely a member matches the person viewing.
- Configurable matching rules, set from the backend, to control what counts as a strong match.
- Automated notifications, welcome emails, daily and weekly digests, and hot-match alerts to bring members back.
It requires BuddyPress with Extended Profiles active, and works with BuddyX, Reign, Youzify, and SocialV. Pricing runs $49/year for one site up to $129/year for unlimited sites, on version 1.7.5.
Is it worth adding
If your community is bigger than a few dozen active members, a manual “search and add” approach to connections doesn’t scale. Suggestions built on real profile-matching logic do most of that work automatically, and the swipe-card interface in particular makes discovering new connections feel like something to do, not a chore.
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