11 Ways to Get More Comments on Your WordPress Blog Posts

Getting more comments on your WordPress blog can boost engagement and build your community. Comments help create a lively and interactive space. They also increase pageviews and make your blog more interesting.

At WPBeginner, our blog posts are often filled with comments, showcasing a vibrant community and driving more interaction.

We use several strategies to encourage comments on our blog, such as hosting a top commenter contest, replying to reader comments, and adding a clear call-to-action (CTA) at the end of each post to invite readers to share their thoughts.

Similarly, you can invite readers to comment on your blog so it will look more active and welcoming.

In this article, we’ll share 11 simple tips to get more comments on your posts.

Why Is It Important to Encourage Readers to Leave Comments?

Encouraging readers to leave comments on your blog posts is very important.

Comments are more than just words at the end of your posts. They show that people are interested in what you have to say. When readers leave comments, your blog feels more alive, which can help improve user engagement.

Comments start conversations. They allow readers to share their thoughts and keep discussions going. Plus, they can also create a sense of belonging among your readers, making them feel like part of a community.

Moreover, comments can provide useful feedback for you as a blogger. So, they help you improve and optimize your content based on what your readers like or dislike.

Finally, a blog with many comments looks more popular and trustworthy. It can signal to search engines that your blog is a valuable resource.

How to Get More Comments on Your WordPress Blog Posts

Now, you know encouraging comments is a great way to make your blog more engaging. In the following sections, we will show you 11 tips to get more comments on your WordPress blog.

Here’s a quick overview of all the tips we will share in this article:

Ready? Let’s explore how to encourage readers to leave their thoughts and feedback on your blog!

1. Allow Users to Subscribe to Comments

When a user leaves a comment on your website, they might want to return to see if there are any new replies.

However, if they don’t bookmark your blog or can’t remember its name, they may have difficulty finding their way back to your site.

You can offer users a chance to subscribe to comments on your WordPress posts. This way, they will receive immediate notifications when a new comment is posted.

By doing so, you can also significantly increase your pageviews and the number of comments on your website. As a result, the discussions on your site can be more engaging.

The Thrive Comments plugin, part of the Thrive Themes suite, can let you easily add a comment subscription feature to your WordPress site.

After signing up on the Thrive Themes website and activating the plugin on your site, you can set up an email delivery service for notifications by connecting an email marketing tool and entering its API key.

For more details, you can look at our guide on how to allow users to subscribe to comments in WordPress.

2. Notify Users of Replies to Their Own Comments

When a user leaves a comment on your site, they can’t tell if anyone has replied unless they bookmark the page and check back later. Unfortunately, most people don’t do that.

You can easily enable users to subscribe to their own comments. This way, they will receive a notification email when someone replies to their comment.

Also, if you make it a habit of replying to most user comments on your site, you will encourage more interaction and keep the conversation going.

To notify users when someone replies to their comments in WordPress, you can use the Thrive Comments plugin. But first, you’ll want to sign up for an account on the Thrive Themes website.

Upon activating the plugin on your WordPress site, you can customize the email notifications for both comment replies and new comments.

For detailed instructions, feel free to check out our tutorial on how to notify users of replies to their own comments in WordPress.

3. Keep Discussion Quality High with Comment Moderation

The best way to ensure quality conversations in the comments is to enable comment moderation in WordPress.

Comment moderation is the process of reviewing and approving comments before they appear on your blog. This helps you ensure that only appropriate comments are visible to your readers.

By moderating comments, you can:

• Prevent comment spam and inappropriate content from being posted.
• Maintain a respectful and constructive conversation.
• Approve comments that add value to the discussion.

In WordPress, you can enable comment moderation to review each comment before it goes live. You can turn this on by going to Settings » Discussion from your admin area.

While comment moderation will help you block spam and inappropriate comments, it also allows you to interact with your users more often.

When you review and approve comments, you can take the time to reply and engage with your readers. This interaction can make them feel valued and encourage them to comment more often.

Thrive Comments is a top choice for setting up comment moderation. To get started, you can purchase Thrive Comments individually or as part of the Thrive Themes Suite.

After installation, you will find an advanced moderation interface with options to filter, assign, and feature comments.

Additionally, Thrive Comments provides detailed reports on comment activity to help evaluate user engagement.

For step-by-step instructions, you can refer to our beginner’s guide on moderating comments in WordPress.

4. Show Newest Comments First

By default, WordPress shows the newest comment at the bottom of the comments list. So, if there are many comments on a post, users will see the oldest comments on top.

Changing the order allows your readers to see the most recent discussions first, which can be more relevant and engaging. It also makes it easier for returning visitors to catch up on new comments without scrolling through older ones.

To change the comment order from newest to oldest, simply go to Settings » Discussion and scroll down to the ‘Other comments settings’ section. From here, you’ll want to select ‘newer’ from the drop-down menu.

For more details, you might want to take a look at our tutorial on how to display the most recent comments on top.

5. Turn On Comments for Old Posts

Most bloggers turn off comments on older posts to reduce comment spam. However, there may be users who want to comment on these posts.

Since you are already using comment moderation, you can safely turn on comments on old posts.

Simply go to Settings » Discussion and scroll down to the ‘Other comments settings’ section. Uncheck the box next to ‘Automatically close comments on articles older than X days.’

Don’t forget to click the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your settings.

6. Showcase Your Top Commenters

Highlighting your top commenters is a good way to encourage and appreciate your most loyal users.

This shows users that they are part of your blog’s community and that you appreciate their effort to bring life to your comments.

For example, at WPBeginner, we showcase our top commenters as part of our Top Commenter contest. This encourages people to contribute more actively and sparks a fun sense of competition and engagement among our readers.

To show off top commenters, you can install and activate the Top Commentators Widget plugin. Upon activation, you’ll want to navigate to Appearance » Widgets and add the ‘Top Commenters’ widget to a sidebar.

For more detailed instructions, see our guide on how to display your top commenters in the WordPress sidebar.

7. Display Recent Comments

When users land on your website for the first time, they have no idea what’s happening in your comments section.

For example, a new post may be the subject of a heated debate, and users may want to chime in. You can help users keep up with the latest discussions by showing recent comments on your site.

To do this, you can head over to Appearance » Widgets and add the Latest Comments widget to a sidebar.

8. Allow Users to Rate Comments

The default WordPress commenting system is plain and simple. It does not have the social, gamification, and user engagement elements of a modern discussion platform.

However, you can easily add these features to WordPress using plugins.

For instance, you might allow users to rate comments using an upvote / downvote feature.

Thrive Comments is the best plugin for allowing users to rate comments. All you need to do is enable the ‘Up and down’ option in the ‘Voting and Badges’ section.

This will allow users to like or dislike comments in WordPress.

If you only want to add the like button to your comments, then you can do that, too! Simply click the ‘Up only’ option.

For more details, you can read our guide on how to allow users to like or dislike comments in WordPress.

9. Notify Users When Their Comment is Approved

If you enable comment moderation, WordPress shows users that their comment is awaiting moderation after they submit it on your blog. However, they won’t know if their comment gets approved or deleted.

Notifying users when their comment is approved can increase page views and user engagement.

To do this, you can install and activate the Comment Approved Notifier Extended plugin. Once activated, the plugin automatically sends an email notification every time you approve a comment.

To learn more, you can see our step-by-step guide on how to notify users when you approve their comments.

10. Allow Users to Edit Comments in WordPress

By default, users cannot edit their comments after submitting them. This can frustrate people as they may want to correct a typo or grammar mistake.

Just install and activate the Simple Comment Editing plugin. It lets users easily edit their own comments and allows you to set a time limit for editing permission.

For details, feel free to see our article on how to allow users to edit comments in WordPress.

11. Get Better WordPress Hosting

Comments consume resources on your web hosting server, which may affect your overall WordPress speed and performance.

When a user submits a comment on your WordPress site, your server runs a PHP script. If multiple users submit comments at the same time, this could slow down or even crash your site.

To get more comments on your site, you first need to make sure your website can handle this engagement.

The easy way to deal with this is to use a WordPress caching plugin. This should work for most websites on a shared WordPress hosting provider.

However, for busier websites, this may not be enough. If you have a larger site, then you might want to try a managed WordPress hosting provider like WP Engine or SiteGround for better speed.

Bonus Tip: Running WordPress Contests

Running contests on your WordPress site can be a fantastic way to boost engagement.

One powerful tool for this is RafflePress, which is a user-friendly plugin for creating and managing giveaways and contests. It lets you set up different ways to enter your contests, including commenting on different articles on your website.

By doing so, you incentivize your readers to leave more comments. This not only helps with contest participation but also boosts overall engagement on your site. It’s a win-win!

The good news is that RafflePress allows you to add multiple entry methods, so you can combine that with other actions like subscribing to your newsletter, sharing a post on social media, and more.

You can follow our tutorial on how to run a giveaway / contest in WordPress with RafflePress for more details.

We hope this article helped you learn new ways to get more comments on your WordPress blog posts. Next, you may also want to see our guide on how to style the WordPress comments layout and our expert picks of the best plugins to improve WordPress comments.

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