There are quite few WordPress comment plugins out there but you are going to need these two to make a huge difference.
WordPress comment plugins – What for?
The WordPress blogging script comes with an inbuilt blog commenting system. But this needs some improvement if you want your commenting activities to be more exciting.
Blog commenting is an exercise that adds value to your blog. If you are like me, any improvement on your blog that boosts comments (with no negative effect) will be highly embraced.
The traditional WordPress comment feature is too skeletal and lacks some attractive elements. Note that some of your readers are going to be pulled to the comment section by some of these factors we will see with Thrive Comments.
2 WordPress Comment Plugins I use & recommend
My most recommended comment plugins for WordPress bloggers are not social media based. One quick reason I hate Facebook and Google Plus commenting systems is the fact that they keep your comments. The day you decide to switch, you surrender all your comments to them. That’s bad if you ask me.
Here are the best comment plugins for WordPress I think you should give a try as from today:
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1 – Thrive Comments
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Lisa is a friend and a wonderful social media, SEO and blogging blogger. While reading her blog post on OnPage SEO, I found out the comment section on her blog was new and looking really great.
Beside the beautiful design of the comment form, there were some elements that are surely going to boost engagement on her blog.
Thrive Comment will empower your blog to spur faster feedback and increase engagement through several innovative features like upvoting and downvoting, gamified comment incentives and an impressive number of after-comment-actions.
Quickly as a reader, you are able to sort the comment list by Newest, Oldest or top rated. If you know how powerful comments on your niche blog can help you with blog post ideas, you won’t neglect this feature.
-> Comment rating and social media sharing
Thrive comment allows your readers to rate other comments and share the comments on social media. These are elements that turns your blog to a busy street.
As an admin, you are able to easily feature a great comment and moderate others without necessarily going to the dashboard. Once a comment is featured, it will remain stuck to the top of the comment list despite the sorting order.
-> Automatically add links to keywords on your comments
There are some plugins out there that are meant to turn keywords on your blog to links. Most of these plugins are going mess up your blog.
But the way Thrive Comment does it is praise worthy. From with your plugin settings page, you are able to add keywords and their anchor links.
You can add as many keywords as possible pointing to the same link. You have the choice to set these links to follow or no-follow for SEO purposes.
These is one amazing feature for affiliate marketers. You simply add keywords to your affiliate offers, while making them no-follow.
-> Related Posts after dropping a comment
One really awesome feature I found with Thrive Comment is the related post after a reader drops a comment. What happens is the reader will be shown a list of related articles once he/she submits a comment. Here is what it looks like:
-> Does Thrive Comments have any load impact on your blog?
Installing this plugin won’t have a negative effect on your blog. The reason is that you can set comments to only display if reader has scrolled to the comment section of your blog.
Same thing with Gravatar. They are not loaded until within screen. Long list of comments is broken down to top level comments per page. This of course will help boost your load speed.
Now I’m not doing a complete review of Thrive Comments as one of my top two Wordpress Comment Plugins. This plugin has lots of goodies. I will be reviewing and going to more details in the days ahead.
[thrive_link color=’orange’ link=’https://enstinemuki.com/thrivecomment’ target=’_blank’ size=’medium’ align=’aligncenter’]Visit Thrive Comments Now![/thrive_link]
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2 – MyCommentAuthors
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This is one of my best WordPress Comment Plugins of all times. It doesn’t directly affect the comment section of your blog. Your readers will have no direct contact with this plugin.
Beside being a comment boosting plugin, MyCommentAuthors will remarkably increase your traffic and engagement:
Here is how it functions:
- You install the plugin.
- Generate a list of comment authors on your blogger for the past months.
- Create a blog post and publish the list.
- Send a Thank You mail from with the plugin.
Your benefit as blog owner is that it will bring repeat visitors to your blog. This means growing traffic and engagement.
Your commentators are going to like the link on your blog and the mention. This is because the list generated by the plugin include a link back to the commentator’s url.
You have full control over the links that are generated – Making them do-follow or no-follow. Here is a blog post with some details about this plugin.
Some bloggers that use MyCommentAuthors:
- Monna Ellithorpe
- Philip Verghese ‘Ariel’
- Lisa Sicard
- Erika Mohssen
- Joy Healey
-> What about CommentLuv ?
One of the best WordPress comment plugins has been CommentLuv. But this hasn’t been updated for the past 2 years. I wanted to give it a try again but there is growing security risk and compatibility issues associated with using it.
Conclusion and your feedback
Drop a comment and let me know what you think about these comment plugins. Are you still using CommentLuv? Do you have any of these other plugins? What specifically do you think of Thrive Comments and MyCommentAuthors?