10 WordPress Comments Plugins to Supercharge Comments

If you own a WordPress site, you must know of or are using the WordPress comments to engage with your readers. The default commenting system leaves a lot to be desired though, so it’s a good thing that there are plenty of WordPress plugins out there that you can use to hack the comments section with cool upgrades and better control.

Listed below are some WordPress plugins that allow you to better engage your readers by allowing them to subscribe to comments, tag or mention another commentor by name, toggle open or close comments section for certain pages, limit the length of comments or even rank your commentors in a leaderboard.

1. Yoast Comment Hacks

This plugin by Yoast lets you hack the WordPress comment system with a few upgrades such as email notifications, limiting minimum number of words in a comment, redirecting users who have left comments to a thank you page, or even send a campaign to all commentors.

2. WP Ajaxify Comments

By default, when a reader makes a mistake when filling up a comment form (such as missing a field), WordPress displays an error message on a new page, forcing the user to go back a page to correct their mistake.

WP Ajaxify Comments adds AJAX functionality preventing the browser from reloading a new page when validating or adding new comments. Error messages will display in the same page.

3. wpDiscuz

wpDiscuz lets readers discuss, vote up/down and share a comment . There is also a Live Update mode that updates new comments as they come in. The interface is also customizable within the plugin options on the dashboard.

4. Disable Comments

If you don’t want comments at all on your site, Disable Comments lets you do this throughout the site or for a certain post type. This means trackbacks and pingbacks are also disabled, and will also hide comment-related fields from the edit or quick edit screens.

5. One Click Close Comments

On your dashboard, this plugin adds a color indicator to all posts that shows whether the comment status of the post or page is open (green) or closed (red). To change the status, toggle the indicator by clicking it.

6. Comment Guestbook

Comment Guestbook allows you to add a guestbook page which uses the default WordPress comment system. To enable this plugin simply add the [comment-guestbook] shortcode to your page.

You can then customize the guest book in the Options page such as changing the form position, text, hiding elements or how to sort comments and more.

7. Deeper Comments

One of the features that you’ll notice immediately is the ability to sort the comment based on their Popularity and Trend. Users can also vote the comments, edit their own comment, or delete them.

These features will improve the experience when interacting with the comment section in WordPress.

8. Lazy Load for Comments

Having comment on your WordPress blog can give you many benefits such as being able to interact with your readers, build community for your blog, and some SEO benefits.

But despite these benefits, having the comment could slow down your website as it adds extra queries to each of the post loaded. This plugin aims to solve this problem by allowing you to load the comment section on demand whether it’s on click or on scroll.

9. Replyable

Replyable improve the experience on how people interact with the comment on your blog. With this plugin, users can subscribe to your comment section to keep up to date with the conversation directly through their email, and they can also reply directly from their email as well.

This conversation presents nicely with email template customizable to your website design.

10. Discourse

An official plugin from Discourse, a forum platform, providing seamless integration to your posts and the forum. This plugin will create a forum topic for discussion when a new blog post is published and embed select conversation back to the posts.

It also provides single-sign-on mecahnism that can associate users login from the website back to the form.