10 Best WordPress Plugins to Improve Comments System

Average Rating:

There are some things that indicate the level of quality of a blog, one of which is its comment activity. After all, it’s not always easy to attract users into your blog who are capable of sharing their insights. But once you’ve got a few reliable members participating in this on-site social community, there could be a lot of benefits. Then again, this can be a double-edged sword, too. Comments can have a bad rap, and many believe that it’s directly attributed to the poor experience associated with not just leaving comments but managing them, too. Perhaps it’s time to change all that.

If you’ve ever gone through the process of creating a simple blog, then you’ve surely come across the WordPress comments system. It’s very basic but is just enough for bloggers who are just starting out. However, you’ll find it lacking if you want to give your readers more functionality or if you want to improve their commenting experience in any way.

To allow your readers a number of methods to comment on your blog posts and pages, you need to have plugins that will improve the comments system of your site. Fortunately, comment plugins for WordPress have come a long way in the past few years. Not only do you have the option to use threaded commenting, you can also log in with social media accounts and take advantage of a great deal of constantly improving features.

So, without further ado, here are 10 plugins that will elevate you above the default WordPress comments system.

Enjoy!

Top Commentators Widget

Why do users comment? Sometimes, it’s for the link, but sometimes, it’s for the glory. For those valued commentators, you need to do something special. With the Top Commentators Widget, you can add it to showcase the top commentators in your WordPress-based blog or website. At the time of writing, thewidget has more than 115,000 downloads.

Facebook Comments for WordPress

This plugin lets your visitors comment on posts using their Facebook profile. It supports custom styles, notifications, combined comment counts, recent comments, and more. It has more than 450,000 downloads.

Disqus Comment System

The Disqus Comment System boasts more than a million downloads, replacing the default WordPress comment system with a feature-rich comment system, hosted and powered by Disqus. It can be a little tricky to set up at first, but once it’s working well, implementing a comment-supportive environment is a breeze.

Greg’s Comment Length Limiter

Some commenters can take advantage of the forum you provide in your commenting system. This WordPress plugin solves that issue by providing a configurable limit on the length of comments left in the comment form, with a dynamically updated character count displayed for the user.

IntenseDebate Comments

IntenseDebate Comments is a plugin that enhances and encourages conversation on your blog. You can build your reader community, increase your comments, and boost page views. At the time of writing, the plugin has more than 450,000 downloads.

WP Ajax Edit Comments

It’s not unusual for users to want editing capabilities of their comments after they’ve been published. This plugin allows users to make some changes to their own comments for a limited time, while administrators can edit all comments. It has more than 280,000 downloads to date.

Twitter Mentions as Comments

For those who are big believers in Twitter, you’ll see that this plugin has its own merits, and commenting is likely to be one of them. This plugin scans Twitter for people talking about blog posts and inserts their tweets alongside existing comments, leveraging the power of WordPress’ built-in commenting system.

Livefyre Comments 3

 

Livefyre Comments 3 is a real-time comment solution that focuses on conversations from around the social Web back to your content, while at the same time encouraging live engagement between users on your website or blog.

Better WordPress Recent Comments

A common way to encourage more comments to your posts is to showcase the current commenting activity on your blog. This particular plugin displays recent comment lists at assigned locations, and has comprehensive support for widgets. The plugin does work well, but it requires some extensive configuration, one possible reason it has generated just over 40,000 since launch.

SEO Super Comments

If search engines crawl comments (and you know they do), why not consider optimizing the content within those comments? SEO Super Comments turns blog comments into entirely new, dynamic, standalone pages that contain the actual comment information without requiring the WP database.