The default WordPress comments functionality works just fine, particularly if you’re just starting. However, your commenters are likely your most engaged readers. So you may want to take full advantage of the access you have to them.
As users ask questions, this makes discussion and also depending on how powerful your comment system is you’ll probably even share images or simple make jokes. While other comment systems provide social sharing tools.
Some reasons why the WordPress Comments section is great!
Interaction; First are you blogging for yourself or an audience?
If it is the latter and (I hoping it the latter) having an open comments section allows you to communicate much easier with your audience.
Feedback; The comments section gives your audience an easy way to provide you with feedback.
Generate Content Ideas; Scan the comments relating to any post and it certainly provides you with plenty of ideas for your follow up content.
SEO; When your users leave comments it will aid your SEO performance, so the user-generated content will fill out your page and will be fully acknowledged when search engines crawl around your site.
Community; When you have your comments section is open, you will certainly notice the same people commenting again and again. When you interact with these people, you’ll begin to build your community around your blog, which encourages loyalty.
Downsides with the WordPress Comments section
Spam; Having your comment open up will be inundated with all kinds of absurd pingbacks, trackbacks, and also bot-generated comments. So if you think that you don’t have much of an audience, the fact of the matter is that you do have an audience but unfortunately most of them are bots.
Moderation; You can install every kind of spam blockers, but one bit of spam can still simply slip through the cracks. So moderating the comments can create a huge drain on your time.
So, in this WordPress Wednesday we’ll take a look at a quick 4 Comment Plugins for your site.
1. wpDiscuz
wpDiscuz is a perfect WordPress comments plugin. The plugin provides a new look for your comment section. It has features such as inline comments, live notifications of comments and updates. Also, it has a post rating feature, social media integration, rich editor, supports media and uses reCAPTCHA to help decrease spam on your website.
With this comment plugin, it has the looks, value and ease of use. You have many styles to choose from, comments lazy-loading in which helps site performance too.
Lastly, it has a full reporting tool with graphs and metrics if that’s your thing. The core of this plugin is completely free, although there’s an optional add-on bundle that cost $99.00
2. Thrive Comments
Thrive Comments is a comment plugin, this plugin is from the people behind Thrive Themes. It is a powerful plugin that adds gamification to commenting with votes, badges and comment sharing. Since social networks are built on this gamification system its efficiency is well known.
Also, the plugin allows social media log in, share prompts to get commenters to share your post on their own social media account and it also replaces the native comment section with a new and better-looking system.
There is also the ability to measure lots of metrics around your comment section. You purchase Thrive Comments through the Thrive suite which is a subscription based model, it starts at $19.00 per a month
3. Disqus Comment System
Probably the best-known WordPress comments plugin, Disqus powers comments on many large sites. This plugin is a hosted solution that uses the cloud to provide the resources to manage comments. It has a flexible system that uses an API to link your comment section to the Disqus platform. Thus keeping everything tidy.
This solution is good due to its single login, which means you can comment on any site that uses Disqus without having to log in again, this cuts down on remembering username and passwords as well. There’s an option to use social media to log in. There is a slight downside with using this plugin and that is because you will need to log in to comment, so if you wising to post that comment anonymously you cant.
You’ll find that this has a free option but it’s ad-supported and some premium options that are not.
4. GraphComment
GraphComment is the last plugin on this list. This plugin is another fully-featured comments plugin for WordPress that transforms the way your comments are handled.
Similar to Disqus, this solution is cloud base that includes guest commenting, customisation options, gamification elements with badges like Thrive Comments, and social media login all contains a visually appealing dashboard for managing and moderating comments.
It uses structured data for comments which benefit SEO and has voting options to help increase engagement. As all the data is stored on GraphComment servers. The plugin includes tools that copy all data to your WordPress database.
GraphComment is a really good plugin that has free options but like many others, there’s a couple of premium plans that start at $7 and $74 per month.
