Comments have been an integral part of the WordPress platform since it forked from b2/cafelog in 2003.
Whilst there have been some refinements to comments in the backend of WordPress to help reduce spam and improve comment moderation, the frontend comment form has remained unchanged since WordPress launched.
Readers who want to publish a comment on a WordPress website are still presented with four fields: comment, name, email, and website (optional).
You can see an example of this in the screenshot below, which shows the aThemes comment form.
The default WordPress form is functional but lacks many advanced features. For example, it does not natively allow commenters to get email updates and log in using their favorite social media service.
That is why many WordPress websites replace or enhance the WordPress comment form.
In this article, I would like to share with you what we at aThemes consider to be the best six comment WordPress plugins.
1. wpDiscuz
wpDiscuz is a fast-loading AJAX-powered comment WordPress plugin that displays new comments in real-time. It’s built upon the default WordPress comment system, therefore you do not need to offload comments to an external server as all comments are stored in your website’s database.
wpDiscuz adds hundreds of additional comment settings and features to WordPress. This includes social media logins, enhanced comment layouts, inline commenting, post ratings, comment subscriptions, comment statistics, live notifications, and anti-spam protection.
The number of options available in wpDiscuz is astounding, however the developers have simplified the setup process by providing a user-friendly installation wizard.
In step one of the wizard, you can select between a light and dark style and three unique comment layouts. In the next step, you can choose to display a comment bubble on your pages and define where it is positioned and whether it shows live updates. The last step shows you how to display inline comments in articles and asks whether you want to show article ratings.
The main wpDiscuz dashboard highlights the latest updates to the plugin and gives you an overview of your comments and users. This helps you see how many discussions are active on your website, how many comments came from registered users, and how many comments were posted by guests.
wpDiscuz works right out of the box, but hundreds of options can be found across 15 categories in the main settings page. The vast majority of settings can be switched off and on at the click of a button, and there is a dedicated phrases page where you can change the text of all phrases that are used in the plugin.
wpDiscuz also provides a tools page where you can import and export options and phrases, rebuild ratings, fix database tables, and more.
One of the best features of wpDiscuz is forms. You can create an unlimited number of comment forms, and each one is customizable.
For each form, you can define what fields are displayed, which layout is used, which post types the form is displayed on, and what user groups are allowed to comment. You can also change the language of forms and the text that is displayed in the form header.
wpDiscuz is free to download, however 18 premium plugin add-ons are available that extend functionality further. Add-ons include an ad manager, comment author info, media uploader, private comments, subscription manager, and user mentions.
Each add-on retails between $9 and $25 for a single license, however for a ten website license, this cost can increase up to $125 per add-on. These prices are purposefully high to encourage you to upgrade to the wpDiscuz Addons Bundle, which gives you unlimited usage for all add-ons for only $99.
wpDiscuz is undoubtedly one of the best comment solutions available to WordPress users. It stands out from the crowd for a number of reasons, such as its fast-loading forms, which can be styled and customized for different areas of your website.
In the backend of wpDiscuz, website owners will love how many configuration options are available and appreciate its native support of BuddyPress, WooCommerce, and anti-spam WordPress plugins such as Akismet and WordPress Zero Spam.
For me, wpDiscuz is a great solution for WordPress users because it provides many tools to encourage readers to participate in discussions. Support for social media platforms makes it easier for readers to publish comments, and features such as subscriptions, post ratings, and comment badges will keep them coming back.
Without a doubt, if you are looking for more control over your WordPress comments and want to increase engagement on your website, you should check out wpDiscuz.
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2. Thrive Comments
Thrive Comments is a premium comment solution from WordPress veterans Thrive Themes.
The plugin increases engagements with readers by allowing them to like and upvote comments. You can reward commenters by making comments featured and give them badges for participation.
Users can sign in via their preferred social media service and share individual comment URLs via Facebook or Twitter. Speed has been considered too. To improve page loading times, you can use lazy loading and load additional comments once they scroll down the page.
To install Thrive Comments, you first need to download and activate the Thrive Product Manager plugin. This plugin can be used to install every WordPress theme and plugin Thrive Themes has released.
The Thrive Comments settings area is divided into eight sections: General Settings, Comment Conversion, Comment Sign-In, Customize Style, Voting & Badges, Notifications, Comment Moderation, and Advanced Settings.
At the top of the page, you will find links to comment reports and moderation, but my favorite part of the settings page is the preview area on the right-hand side. Whenever you change a setting, you can see how it affects your comment area. You can change previews from desktop to mobile too.
Once you explore the settings area, you start to appreciate how good Thrive Comments is.
In the comment conversion section, you can define what happens once someone leaves their first comment and what happens after they publish another one. For example, you could first display a thank you message to them and when they post another comment, you could redirect them to your newsletter signup page.
Commenters can sign in using their Facebook and Google accounts. In the style section, you can select the accent color that is used in the comment area and upload a placeholder avatar for those that do not have a Gravatar account.
All major features can be switched on and off. Should you desire, you can disable avatars, social media logins, voting and badges, GDPR consent, email notifications, and more.
Thrive Comments presents comments with a modern and professional design, but what happens in the backend of your website is just as important.
Thrive Themes have developed a host of tools to help you manage large volumes of comments. Comments are categorized as pending, unreplied, pending my reply, featured, spam, or trash. To ensure more in-depth questions and comments are addressed, you can assign comments to staff, and it will appear in their “Pending My Reply” section.
Keyboard shortcuts are also provided to help you moderate comments quicker.
Five reports are available in the reports page: Comments Graph, Vote Engagements, Most Active Commenters, Most Popular Posts, and Most Upvoted Comments.
Reports can be filtered to help you analyze comment activity and how readers are interacting with each other.
Thrive Comments is part of the Thrive Suite that gives you access to all Thrive Themes products, such as Thrive Theme Builder, Thrive Architect, Thrive Optimize, and more. It costs $19 per month (billed annually).
It is easy to recommend Thrive Comments. It boasts many features that will improve engagement with your readers and the provided moderation tools simplify the process of comment administration.
3. Jetpack Comments
It would be an understatement to say that the Jetpack WordPress plugin has been a success.
Automattic’s flagship WordPress plugin is installed on over five million WordPress websites. It offers uptime monitoring, brute force protection, secure logins, website backups, malware scanning, page optimization, management tools, and more.
One feature that is often overlooked is Jetpack Comments. The module adds social media logins for commenters together with email updates for comments and your website.
Comment form settings can be configured in the discussion tab of Jetpack.
In the comments area, you can allow users to log in via WordPress.com, Twitter, Facebook, and Google. You can change the header tag for your form and change from a light style to dark or transparent.
Other features available here are Gravatar pop-up business cards, a markdown system so that commenters can format their messages, and the ability for comments to be liked.
Readers can also choose to receive email updates about new comments and blog posts. I used Jetpack Comments on my blog for years and I found this subscription feature to be very efficient in increasing blog subscribers.
Whilst other comment enhancement solutions transform the whole comment section with a new style, Jetpack Comments is more subtle and simply adds new social media login options and subscription options to the comment form.
I am a big fan of Jetpack’s minimalist approach to comments. I recommend checking it out if you want to add social media logins to your comment form or encourage people to subscribe to your website via Jetpack Subscriptions.
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4. GraphComment Comment System
GraphComment Comment System is a hosted comment solution that aims to increase conversations on your website.
It allows users to log in via Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Anonymity is not permitted, therefore even guest posters will have to sign up for a GraphComment account.
It offers community profiles, voting and badges, many beautiful color schemes, and a notification center that helps users see updates to their comments.
To use the GraphComment WordPress plugin, you need to sign up for a free account on the main GraphComment website. You will then be prompted to add some information about your website, such as name, URL, and others.
All comments are stored on GraphComment’s servers. However, in the plugin settings area, you can sync comments back to your own website every minute, 10 minutes, 30 minutes, hour, or 12 hours.
You can choose to enable GraphComment for all blog posts on your website, or only use it from a specific date. Once you have selected which option you prefer, you can start importing your comments into GraphComment.
The GraphComment admin interface displays the main website administration area from GraphComment.com. The settings page is divided into eight sections: Website Settings, Notifications & Emails, Moderation, Word Filtering, Appearance, Languages, Authentication, and Export.
There are dozens of settings in this area. For instance, you can change how many comments are displayed, how many images are allowed per message, which users are moderators, which color scheme is used, which words are blacklisted, which languages are available, and more.
Comments can also be exported in WXR format, and users can be exported to a CSV file.
Whilst GraphComment is free to use, some features are reserved for premium users, and they will be greyed out unless you upgrade.
Comments can be moderated via the GraphComment admin area. It does lack some of the advanced moderation tools available in Thrive Comments, but you can assign multiple moderators to pages.
Analytics is really good, though. For a defined date range, you can see the total number of comments, users, and threads. It also highlights the top commenters and threads for this period.
The GraphComment comment area looks very professional. The best discussions can be displayed at the top of the comment area and for each comment, there are options to share, like, and reply.
Profile images of those that have replied are displayed at the top of each comment, and you can load all replies in its own pop-up. There are a lot of little things like this implemented into GraphComment that really helps encourage conversations.
A basic account for GraphComment allows a whopping 1,000,000 data loads per month.
Whilst GraphComment is free to use, you will need to upgrade to a premium plan to unlock all features.
The $7 per month starter plan adds a live chat mode where people can chat in real-time. It also allows you to pin discussions to the top of the comment area, set up keyword alerts, and restrict conversations to certain members. Customization is allowed under this plan, and data loads increase to 1,500,000 per month.
High-traffic websites may want to consider the $74 per month pro plan. It offers the same features as the lower-priced starter plan but increases data loads to 5,000,000 per month.
Overall, GraphComment is a great solution. It gives you many great customization and engagement options, the comment form looks great and, unlike Disqus, the free version of GraphComment does not display advertisements.
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5. Disqus Comment System
Launched in 2007, Disqus is a hosted comment service that helps deliver over 50 million comments every month.
Used by some of the largest content websites on the internet, Disqus increases engagement significantly by offering features such as real-time comments, social media logins, and support for embedding images and videos.
Although Disqus completely replaces the default WordPress comment system, comments are automatically synced back to your WordPress website for backup, so you that you can switch to another comment setup later if you wish.
After signing up for a Disqus account, you can connect it to your website using their free WordPress plugin. All you have to do is copy over the sync token URL to the plugin and the required API information will be retrieved.
There are few options in the Disqus WordPress plugin, as it is merely a bridge between your website and your Disqus account.
A number of tools are available on the main website to help you moderate comments. This includes giving users a reputation rating based on previous comments, pre-moderating comments from trolls, and creating ban lists and trust lists. You can also moderate users via email.
Analytics are also available to help you see comment activity and top comments. This will help you see how readers are engaging with each other.
Since 2017, those who want to use Disqus free of charge have had to accept advertisements in their comment area.
Their $9 per month plus plan allows you to remove these ads. It supports three websites up to 50,000 daily page views (daily, not monthly!).
The $89 per month pro plan increases these limits to 20 websites and 150,000 daily page views. This plan adds advanced moderation tools, advanced analytics, shadow banning, timeouts, custom reactions, and more.
Whether you use the free or premium version of Disqus, there is no doubt that the hosted comment service improves the experience for readers with social media logins, comment sharing, and email subscriptions.
The service also helps website owners administrate comments more effectively.
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6. Lazy Load for Comments
Our final recommendation is Lazy Load for Comments.
The plugin was developed to reduce the number of HTTP requests that are generated from comments by lazy loading comments and Gravatar images.
It is compatible with most WordPress themes, including popular premium WordPress themes such as Genesis and Divi. Lazy Load for Comments was developed with the default WordPress comment system in mind, however it should work with other WordPress comment plugins that add further options to your comment form.
Once Lazy Load for Comments has been activated, you will see a new options area for Lazy Load Comments in the discussion settings page of your WordPress admin area.
The pre-selected option is “On Scroll”, which means that additional comments are loaded when the reader scrolls down the page.
If you prefer, you can ask readers to click to load more comments.
There is an option to disable lazy loading, too, but you would probably be just as well uninstalling the plugin if you do not want to use this feature.
Many of the WordPress comment plugins we have featured in this article have attempted to reduce the increased page load of comments, however Lazy Load for Comments is the only one that was designed specifically for the default WordPress commenting system.
If you wish to continue to use the default WordPress comment form, I recommend using Lazy Load for Comments.
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Final Thoughts
I hope you have enjoyed this look at the best WordPress comment plugins.
As you have seen, there is a good variety of comment solutions on the market. I recommend testing all of them to see which one fits you and your needs.
If you are happy with the default WordPress comment system, I recommend using Lazy Load for Comments to reduce the loading times of blog posts. Jetpack is a great choice if you want a no-frills solution that has support for social media logins and subscriptions through Automattic’s WordPress.com platform.
Those of you who want to transform the WordPress comment system should consider wpDiscuz and Thrive Comments. Both solutions add dozens of customization, moderation, and engagement features. I do believe larger websites will benefit from the moderation tools in Thrive Comments, but the core version of wpDiscuz is free to use, so you may want to try that first.
Disqus and GraphComment Comment System will completely replace the WordPress comment system, so your comments will be hosted on their servers, but they do allow you to regularly sync comments back to your WordPress database.
Many large content websites opt for a hosted comment solution such as Disqus, as it offloads the data to an external service, but on smaller websites, the performance benefits of hosting with them may be minimal.
Both Disqus and GraphComment will help you display comments in a professional manner. They allow social media logins, have advanced analytics, and improve the experience of commenters. Whilst both platforms have their strengths and weaknesses, I would lean towards GraphComment if you do not want to pay a monthly fee since their basic account does not display advertisements.
Good luck.
Kevin
