16 Best Plugins to Improve WordPress Comments (2023)

Are you looking for the best plugins to improve WordPress comments?

Comments can help you engage readers and build a community. The default WordPress commenting system is good, but it’s quite basic. Luckily, there are tons of plugins that can help you create a more engaging comment section.

In this article, we’ll show you some of the best plugins to improve WordPress comments and boost engagement on your website.

1. Thrive Comments

Thrive Comments is a powerful and easy-to-use WordPress comments plugin. It allows you to easily build an engaged and interactive community on your WordPress site.

You can encourage quality comments, similar to Reddit, by allowing users to up-vote or down-vote comments. You can also reward users with custom badges for participating in conversations.

To reduce the hassle of signing in, you can allow visitors to leave a comment straight from their social media accounts. To boost social sharing, users can share individual comments from your posts on Facebook, Twitter, and by URL.

Managing your comments is easy with Thrive Comments as well. It comes with a built-in, keyboard-controlled comment moderation dashboard where you can quickly reply, delete, and even assign comments to other admins.

The best part? With this plugin, you can turn comments into conversions by setting up post-comment actions. You can redirect a commenter to a specific URL, show them a related post, display an email optin using Thrive Leads, and more.

Other features include comment sorting, featured comments, audience insights, subscribe to a post’s comments, auto-linking, and more.

2. Comment Moderation Role by WPBeginner

Comment Moderation Role by WPBeginner is a simple plugin that creates a new ‘WPB Comment Moderator’ user role in WordPress.

Any user with this role can log into your website and moderate comments without having access to other areas of your WordPress blog or website.

This is perfect if you have a support team or staff members who are responsible for moderating comments, but these people don’t need unrestricted access to your entire WordPress admin area.

By limiting their access, Comment Moderation Role can help you keep complete control over your WordPress website and improve your website security.

For detailed instructions on how to use this plugin, see our tutorial on how to let blog users moderate comments in WordPress.

3. Uncanny Automator

Uncanny Automator is the best automation plugin for WordPress. It lets you easily create automated workflows on your WordPress site. These workflows can save you time and give the people who visit your website a better experience.

With Uncanny Automator you can choose triggers and actions. An action is any task that Uncanny Automator performs when the automation ‘recipe’ is triggered.

You can use Uncanny Automator to automate many different parts of your website including how it manages comments. For example, you might use it to automatically email a user every time their comment gets a reply.

This recipe could get you lots more engagement, while also improving the visitor experience.

Uncanny Automator works with all of the top WordPress plugins including WooCommerce, MemberPress, LearnDash, and more. You can even connect Uncanny Automator to more than 4000 third-party apps using the popular Zapier automation tool.

For more information, please see our step by step guide on how to create automated workflows in WordPress.

4. Yoast Comment Hacks

Yoast Comment Hacks is a suite of tools that can make lots of small improvements to how your site manages and moderates comments.

With Yoast Comment Hacks, you can email comment authors or any users who have commented on a particular post. You can also customize your comment notification emails, redirect first-time commenters to a thank you page, assign comments to a specific thread, and more.

For more information, take a look at our guide on how to install and set up Yoast Comment Hacks for WordPress.

5. wpDiscuz

wpDiscuz is an AJAX real-time comment system that adds some advanced features to the built-in WordPress comment section. This includes a Comment Bubble that notifies visitors about new comments as they’re being posted.

These real-time social proof notifications let visitors know what’s happening on your site right now and encourages them to join in the conversation.

wpDiscuz lets you choose between three professionally-designed comment layouts for your website. You can even use different layouts on different pages and post types.

After adding wpDiscuz to your WordPress website, you can see detailed comment and comment author statistics in the wpDiscuz Dashboard. This helps you see what content is getting lots of engagement on your website, so you can create more of it.

6. Simple Comment Editing

Sometimes a user may submit a comment, only to immediately realize they have made a spelling mistake or some other grammatical error. This isn’t your website’s fault, but it is still a bad experience for the people who visit your site.

Simple Comment Editing solves this problem by letting users edit their own comments on your website.

You can use this plugin to specify a period of time when visitors can edit or even delete a comment after posting it. This time limit is important, as it protects your website from spammers who might go back and try to add links to comments that you’ve already approved.

For more details, check out our guide on how to allow users to edit comments in WordPress.

7. Subscribe to Comments Reloaded

Comments can help you build communities and create lots of engagement for your website. However, many people read an article, leave a comment, and then never return to that article.

Even if the post gets lots more comments, this person might never return to the conversion. This makes it difficult for visitors to get into in-depth discussions on your pages and posts.

Subscribe to Comments Reloaded allows users to sign up for email notifications whenever someone posts a new comment on a particular article.

These notifications are a great way to keep visitors coming back to your website.

Comment subscription is also useful for comment threads that generate a lot of discussions or heated debates. This plugin lets people subscribe to these lively comment threads, so they can follow along with the conversation.

Users can unsubscribe at any time and manage their own subscriptions on your website. To learn more, see our guide on how to allow users to subscribe to comments in WordPress.

8. WP Mail SMTP

WordPress sends many important emails including comment notifications. In fact, some of the comment plugins on this list send emails to your users.

With that in mind, you’ll want to make sure those emails arrive safely in the recipient’s inbox and not in their spam folder.

WP Mail SMTP is the best WordPress SMTP plugin that allows you to easily send WordPress emails using a secure mail transfer protocol or SMTP. This helps to make sure all your WordPress emails are delivered successfully.

For more details, see our guide on how to fix the WordPress emails not sending issue.

Note: There is a free WP Mail SMTP Lite plugin that will improve your WordPress email deliverability. However, this free version does not include many of the plugin’s more advanced features, including email logs, notification management, analytics, and more.

9. WordPress Comments Fields

By default, the WordPress comment area has four fields: Name, Email, Website, and Comment. Depending on your website, you may want to add some extra fields.

WordPress Comments Fields makes it easy to add custom fields to the standard WordPress comment form.

These fields could be the visitor’s Twitter username, business phone, date of birth, or anything else you want.

The plugin will then take the data from these custom feeds and show it under the person’s comment on your website, as ‘comment meta.’ You can also see the data entered into these fields in your WordPress admin area.

To learn more about this plugin, see our step-by-step guide on how to add custom fields to comments form in WordPress.

10. Better Notifications for WordPress

By default WordPress only sends comment notifications to site administrators and the article’s author.

Better Notifications for WordPress allows you to change who gets these comment notification emails. For example, you may want to notify a moderator instead of your site’s administrator.

This plugin has lots of different triggers that you can use to create your notification emails. For example, you might want to let the author know when their comment gets approved.

For more details, see our tutorial on how to create custom WordPress notification emails.

11. Remoji Reactions

Remoji Reactions allows you to add Slack-style emojis to your WordPress posts, pages, and comment sections.

After activating this plugin, visitors can react to any comment by posting an emoji. This is a quick, easy, and fun way for visitors to engage with your comment sections without having to type out a reply.

The plugin also has widgets that show the most frequently viewed posts and the posts that visitors are reacting to right now. This makes it easy for visitors to discover new and popular content on your website.

If you’re worried about spammers or trolls flooding your site with negative emojis, then this plugin lets you disable reactions for unregistered users.

For more information, see our step-by-step on how to allow user registration on your WordPress website.

12. One Click Close Comments

Comments are a great way to interact with the people who visit your website. However, you may not want to accept comments on every single page or post.

For example, you might publish an announcement that you don’t want people to comment on. You might also stop accepting new comments on a post once a certain amount of time has passed.

One Click Close Comments makes it easy to close the comment section on any WordPress post. In the WordPress admin area, this plugin shows a green comment icon next to each page or post where visitors can post comments.

To stop accepting comments on a particular post, simply click on its icon to turn it from green to red.

This plugin is AJAX-powered, so this change will go live on your site without you having to reload the page or save your changes. This is ideal if you need to quickly disable the comments on lots of different posts.

For more information, you can check out our ultimate guide on how to completely disable comments in WordPress.

13. WPControl

There are many reasons why you might want to turn off comments for your website. For example, many people use WordPress to make a business website.

These business websites often don’t have a blog and mostly have pages like services, contact us, and about us. In this case, it often doesn’t make sense to let people comment on your site.

WPControl makes it easy to enable and disable different WordPress features, including the comment section. If you don’t want to accept comments, then you can use this plugin to easily disable comments across your entire website.

WPControl can also disable comments on specific post types, such as posts, pages, or media. This lets you accept comments on certain content only.

This plugin can also disable and enable other WordPress features. For example, you can disable the REST API in WordPress, shortlinks, and gravatars.

14. YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews

Customer reviews and testimonials can help convince potential new customers to buy from your business.

Reviews can also help you build stronger relationships with your existing customers by showing that you care about their opinion, and want them to have a good experience with your business.

If you’ve started an online store using WooCommerce, then customers can already post reviews on your website. However, WooCommerce’s built-in review feature is basic. For example, customers can’t add photos to their reviews.

YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews takes your WooCommerce reviews to the next level.

With YITH WooCommerce Reviews, you can create a beautiful review section for your WooCommerce products.

Customers can give their reviews a title, and upload photos. They can also mark reviews as helpful or not, which makes it easier for future customers to find the most useful reviews.

YITH WooCommerce Reviews can show all of your customer feedback as a percentage or bar graph. This is perfect for helping shoppers decide whether a product is right for them.

As the store owner, you can customize the color of the review section to perfectly suit your WooCommerce WordPress theme, decide how many reviews to show on each product page, and more.

15. Comment Link Removal & Other Tools

Spam comments are a big problem for many websites.

Tools such as Akismet are great for filtering out comments left by automated spambots. However, these tools don’t always spot spammy comments posted by real people, particularly if they take the time to complete your site’s anti-spam checks manually.

That’s where Comment Link Removal & Other Tools comes in. This plugin automatically removes links from the comments posted on your WordPress website. It can also remove the author website hyperlink.

WordPress will still show these URLs in your comments, but they won’t be hyperlinked. This means that visitors can still benefit from any genuine and helpful links. At the same time, there’s no danger that a visitor will accidentally click on a spammy link in your comment section, and get sent to a malicious website.

Comment spammers typically want to place a link on your website, so this plugin is a great way to discourage them from commenting on your site.

16. DCO Comment Attachment

Sometimes you may want to allow users to upload images and other files with their comments. For example, you might create a photo contest in WordPress or ask customers to upload a screenshot showing the problem you’re trying to help them with.

The DCO Comment Attachment plugin lets you add a file attachment field to your WordPress comment form.

You can then specify the type of files that visitors can upload, and set a limit on the size of those files. You can also choose whether to embed the attachment along with the comment itself or show the attachment as a link.

DCO Comment Attachment also lets visitors embed links from Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, and other popular websites in their comments.

Bonus: WPForms

Not everyone feels comfortable posting comments on a public website. Some of your customers may prefer to contact you privately using a form.

To collect private feedback and comments from your visitors, you’ll need an advanced form builder plugin.

WPForms is the best WordPress contact form plugin and is used by over 5 million sites.

With WPForms, you get a drag-and-drop form builder that makes it super easy to customize your form. Plus, this plugin comes with over 350 ready-made templates, including multiple feedback form templates.

You can also use WPForms to create surveys and quizzes, login and user registration forms, email newsletter forms, and more.

We hope this article helped you find the best plugins to improve your WordPress comments. Next, you can see our guide on how to create a WordPress membership site, or see our expert pick of the best live chat software for small businesses.

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