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How to Add Disqus Comment System in WordPress

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Disqus pronounced “discuss” is a popular third-party commenting system for WordPress. If you’ve been browsing the web for more than a week, then you’ve probably come across a site that’s using Disqus. A lot of popular sites including CNN, The Next Web, Bloomberg, CNBC, The Atlantic, and now WPBeginner are using Disqus. In this article, we will show you how to add Disqus comment system in WordPress. We will also discuss the reasons why we switched to using Disqus.

Update: We no longer use Disqus on our site. Here are the reasons why we switched away from Disqus.

Adding Disqus Commenting System in WordPress

Adding Disqus commenting system to WordPress is very easy. First thing you need to do is go to Disqus website and login or signup for a new account. Once you are logged in, click on For Websites link next to the Disqus logo.

Disqus for websites

On the next screen, you need to click on Add Disqus to Your Site button next to your profile pic on the top right corner of the screen.

This will take you to a signup form where you need to provide your website information. Provide the title of your blog or website and then choose a unique URL for your website on the disqus commenting system. This unique URL will be the place where you can access all your comments after you have installed Disqus on your site. Lastly choose a category for your website. Once you are done, hit the Finish Registration button.

Registering your site for Disqus commenting system

After the registration, you will be asked to choose your platform. You need to click on WordPress, and it will show you further instructions to setup Disqus commenting system on your WordPress site. Don’t worry we will walk you through these instructions.

Now that you have registered your site for Disqus commenting system, it is time to connect your WordPress site to the Disqus platform. To do this, you need to install and activate the Disqus Comment System plugin. Upon activation, go to Comments » Settings and sign in with your Disqus account.

Login with your Disqus account

Once you are logged in, you will be shown the site you registered for Disqus commenting system. Select the site and click on the next button to finish the set up.

Select your site to install Disqus comments

That’s all. You have successfully added Disqus comment system to your site. You can see it in action by visiting any post on your site, and you will see Disqus comments instead of WordPress comments on your site.

Exporting Older WordPress Comments into Disqus

Since Disqus commenting system takes over the display of comments on your WordPress site, this means that the comments stored on your WordPress site will not be visible to users. To fix this, you will have to export those comments to Disqus commenting system. In WordPress admin area, go to Comments » Disqus and click on the plugin settings tab on the top right corner of the screen.

Disqus Plugin Settings

On the plugin’s settings page, scroll down to Import and Export section and click on Export Comments button. This will initiate the import process and all your old WordPress comments will be exported to Disqus commenting system.

Export WordPress comments to Disqus Commenting System

Moderating Disqus Comments

You can moderate Disqus comments by visiting Comments » Disqus. There you will find a button linking to your comment administration page on Disqus. This is where you can approve, spam, or delete comments.

Disqus comment moderation page

Troubleshooting Disqus Comment Display Issue

On some WordPress themes Disqus comment area may appear wider than rest of the post and page area. To fix this, you need to figure out the width of the content area in your theme and then add this CSS into your theme or child theme‘s stylesheet. 

#disqus_thread {
	margin: 0 auto;
	max-width: 604px;
}

This CSS sets max-width of the comment area to 604px and centers it to the screen. Your theme may have different width so you will have to adjust it accordingly to meet your needs.

We hope this article helped you add Disqus comment system in WordPress. If you liked this article, then subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials or join us on Twitter and Google+.

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Reader Interactions

93 CommentsLeave a Reply

  2. How would I go about making sure that my Disqus comments from my old Blogger site appear on my new WordPress site? I just used your setup service to transfer my content from Blogger to WordPress last month.

    Reply

    • If your Disqus coments are not available then you would go into Disqus and export the old comments to import them to the new site.

      Reply

      Admin

  5. This information has helped me integrate disqus comment system to my personal website. Thank you so much.

    Reply

  7. Hi There,

    Hip Hip Hooray! I was always told that slightly slow in the head, a slow learner. Not anymore! It’s like you have my back. I can’t tell you how much I’ve learnt here and how easily! Thank you for blessing me with this effortlessly ingestible digestible content.

    I was wondering if it was possible assign to a variable type of Array of Strings a value from the REFramework Config file.
    Thank you very much and will look for more postings from you.

    Kind Regards,
    Irene Hynes

    Reply

  9. Hey Guys!

    I am going to have my site
    I intend to optimized my site and incresed the speed of loading page. which plugin do you suggest?
    Thanks in advance
    Mike

    Reply

  11. Hello, I am Jagadish. I added Disqus comment system on my website, but it’s not working. What happen is by mistake I deleted the site from Disqus, before that it’s worked properly. After deletion, I re-added it into Disqus but it’s not working, I tried so many times. Please help me.

    Reply

  12. Thanks
    Because this article is help me .. and one more :)

    I will make this blog name into the shirt. Is it allowed?

    Reply

  15. Every time I log into Disqus through WordPress it keeps telling me “Unable to connect to the Disqus API servers”. I’m sure my email and password are correct though. Please help!

    Reply

  17. Good article, but I am wondering why this current post is not setup with the Disqus plugin? Change of heart?

    Reply

  18. Thanks for this post. Just implemented it though i’m yet get the confirmation email from them after creating the account more than 12 hrs ago. Oddly i got an email after setting it up on my wordpress site but yet to get the confirmation email.

    Reply

  21. Hey, quick question. I have just installed Disqus and previously had a spam filter (WP-SpamShield) can i now remove the filter as Disqus has its own spam filter or should i keep the WP-SpamShield plugin?

    Thanks,

    Reply

  22. As always, another well written article from wpbeginner.com
    I started of seeking help with my problem, which was the size of the over lapping comment bar but grateful your CS hack above did fix it. However I would be overjoyed in having a comment system exactly like this….if you could provide some know-how..?

    Best Regards
    Theo

    Reply

  23. Hey,

    By default, Disqus appears on your posts, not pages. In case you are looking to add Disqus to a particular page on your wordpress website, you can try this simple hack I used.

    Just plugin the universal code at the end of your page in WordPress’s text editor. It works well for me,

    Reply

  24. Hello,
    I’m getting lot of spams on my site with the default comment system, though I have akismet installed. Thought about using Disqus, but I see that Disqus is no longer used by wpbeginner. Can you share why you moved away from disqus ?

    Thanks Aaron.

    Reply

  25. Thanks a whole lot for this post. I’ve decided to start using disqus for some of the same reasons you mentioned here. This was helpful!

    Reply

  26. Okay. I know Disqus is good but I have a question. Is there a way to remove hyperlinks from profile names of people commenting on my blog posts. Here is the link to my blog

    Reply

  30. Hi, very simple expression and useful article. I’m between jetpack plugin and disqus system .Which one is the more useful for visitors and further SEO of website ?

    Reply

  32. I have disqus on my blog for a couple of months, since then I just have received lots of spams and disqus doesn’t work at all. I see disqus on other wordpress blogs and it seem to work very well. I do not know what to do with mine. I always go back to moderate and try to activate it but it doesn’t work, still. Do you have any suggestions?

    Reply

  33. SOOO glad to have you all as a resource! I have transitioned to a self-hosted WP site and I visit your site daily for tips! Thanks for your help and patience…the step by step directions are awesome!! So grateful!

    Reply

  34. Edit the post and make sure comments are enabled for that post. Also go to Settings > Discussion and make sure that the box next to ‘Automatically close comments on articles older __ days’ is unchecked.

    Reply

  35. Thanks for this tutorial. I have earlier registered on disqus, installed and activated the plugin, but ny problem now is, at the footer of my blog post after disqus, I have a report that says, ‘comments are closed’, and another issue is, disqus does not sync with my loged in users. What should I do about this?

    Reply

  37. My experience trying to get Disqus onto my site does not resemble anything like what you have written above. It’s an hour later and I can’t get anything happening . . .

    Reply

    • I sympathize because it is the same for me. There is no “plugins” link on my admin page, nor is there any option for adding Disqus (or anything else) under the Comments link. Maybe it’s because I’ve only got a free WP site, but I didn’t have this much trouble installing Disqus on my Blogger site. There are days I really hate WordPress.

      I hope you got it figured out since you posted 2 weeks ago. :)

      Reply

  38. I personally have used jetpack comments for comment on site to handle spam. Most persons I have noticed are usually uncommon with the disqus concepts and dislike the sign up process, very few notice the ‘guest’ option. But I’m looking into using Vanilla comments by integrating vanilla forums into my wordpress website and keep the comment actions completely under my control simples like a good option to me so far from testing.

    Reply

  39. I don’t have my own blog but I regularly post comments to blogs that use Disqus. Quite frankly, there is so much I dislike about Disqus that I would never use it, without major future improvements, in a blog I had any control over.

    1) Comments either don’t show up at all in Google searches on phrases within them, or they show up as part of the page of the particular commenter’s Disqus comments, rather than as part of the page they comment on.

    2) If I save a web page that has Disqus comments, the comments are not saved with the page, and the ability to retrieve the comments depends on the future maintenance of such comment threads by Disqus.

    3) I can save a page with comments as a PDF, but then the information about the precise date and time of a comment can no longer be seen even by a mouse-over (nor by looking at the non-existent source), so all one sees is how many days, weeks, months or years before the time the page was saved the comment was posted. This makes it impossible to follow the chronology of a discussion.

    4) In one case, a blogger lost his domain name and had to get a new, different one. Since then, the old pages can be accessed with the new domain name, but the old comments do not show. There is a way to get to the original comment thread, but it’s not accessible to the casual user.

    There are other, less serious, annoyances, that have slipped my mind for the moment.

    If I am wrong about any of the items I had listed as problems above, I’d like to know.

    Reply

    • I wonder if Google traffic is lower than it would be if comments don’t show in Google? And of course comments would be the same with Disqus but wouldn’t they become higher over time as more people discover this blog? But if NEW users can’t discover this blog because the comments are not Google searchable…..

      Reply

  40. Recently installed “Disqus Comment System” WordPress plugin, it displays correctly and accepts comments. When I reply through the Dashboard, these won’t show on thread. Should replies be handled directly in the Disqus thread instead?

    Reply

    • Even with Disqus, the comments are fully indexed along with the page. Do a View Source of this page to see for yourself.

      Reply

      • That’s not necessarily true. It’s possible that Google will index your comments, but I’ve seen many more that are not indexed as opposed to those that are.

        Reply

  44. Thanks for this useful article. But there is one question stuck in my mind. Does Disqus affect the load time of posts? Because it uses iframe to load comments. Didi you notice any difference?

    Reply

  45. Hello Syed. What you think about this plugin? – WordPress Comments Evolved – that allow to display G+ comments, FB comments, WordPress and Disqus. I can’t find any useful review in google search, thanks

    Reply

  46. I have two problems about Disqus (which I already use):

    First, it does not allow me to convert my commenters to subscribers by adding a checkbox to the bottom of the comment box. Normally, I was using Mailchimp Comment Optin plugin for this. Also, it does not work with “Comment Redirect by Yoast” plugin…

    Second problem is, Subscribe button is difficult to notice for inexperienced commenters. In wordpress comment box, the simple checkbox for subscribing to the replies was very easy to notice. Also, guest commenters are by default subscribed to all comments. And they are not given option to subscribe to “only replies”. Last, but not least, the word “subscribe” is very ambigious. What is it? Subscribe to my site, subscribe to my newsletter or subscribe to the comments?…

    Third issue is, language support. My site is in Turkish and I can select Disqus interface to be in Turkish. But, when my not English speaking visitor hits “Subscribe”, they are sent an English confirmation email. Or when they wanna edit their subscription preferences, again they are being forwarded to an all Engish page.

    I appreciate your thoughts on these issues…
    Thanks

    Reply

    • its true but there a some WP pages that claim that have to disable disqus because the visitors dint like it. I personaly use Disqus in my site and have no bat experiences until now, but its something that we have to pay attention

      Reply

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