How to Display Your Top Commenters in WordPress Sidebar

Do you want to display your top commenters in the WordPress sidebar?

The comment section allows users to engage with your content. By highlighting your most active commenters in the sidebar, you can encourage other users to join in the conversation.

In this article, we’ll show you how you can display your top commenters in the WordPress sidebar, step by step.

Why Show Top Commenters in Your WordPress Sidebar?

Having a large and active comment section can make your site seem more credible and motivate people to join the discussion. When people are engaging with your comments, they’ll spend longer on your website so it’s also a great way to increase pageviews and reduce the bounce rate.

All of this sends positive WordPress SEO signals to the search engines, so you may even appear higher in the search results.

There are lot of ways to get more comments on your WordPress blog posts, including showing the top commenters in your website sidebar. This encourages visitors to compete for the top spot, by adding gamification to your WordPress comment section.

You might even reward your most loyal visitors by creating a separate comment moderation role and allowing your top commenters to join your team.

With that said, let’s show you how to display your top commenters in your WordPress sidebar.

Displaying Top Commenters in Your WordPress Sidebar

The easiest way to display top commenters in the sidebar is by using Top Commentators Widget. This plugin lets you add the top commenters to your sidebar in a couple of clicks.

First thing you need to do is install and activate the plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, go to Appearance » Widgets. Here, find the ‘Sidebar,’ ‘Blog Sidebar’ or similar widget, and click on its ‘+’ button.

In the popup, start typing ‘Top Commentators Widget.’

When the right block appears, click to add it to the sidebar.

Now, you’ll see a few ways to change how the top commenters look in the sidebar.

First, you can change the title that appears above the widget.

After that, you may want to type in a description, which will appear below the title. For example, you may want to thank your top commenters.

Once you’ve done that, go ahead and type in how many comments a person has to leave before they become a a top commenter.

You can also exclude users from the top commenters list. To start, it’s a good idea to exclude yourself and your customer service team.

If you run a multi-author WordPress blog, then you’ll typically also want to exclude other authors from the top commenters list.

By default, the plugin will reset the top commenter data every month.

Depending on how many comments you get, you may want to change this to weekly or yearly using the ‘Reset period every’ dropdown.

Another option is to show the top commenters of all time, by selecting ‘List All.’

After that, you can control how many names you show in the list, plus how many characters you’ll show from each name.

If you’re a new WordPress blog or have a smaller number of visitors, then you may want to type in some text to show if the list is empty.

If you don’t have any commenters yet, then you can even encourage visitors to leave a comment, as you can see in the following image.

Next, you can change how the list of commenters will look.

You can choose whether to link usernames, show avatars, mark your links as nofollow, and more. Simply work your way through these display settings until you’re happy with how the widget is set up.

You can also add an award icon or badge that will appear next to your top commenters once they’ve posted a certain number of comments. In this way, you can encourage competition between the people in the list, which can mean lots more comments for your WordPress website or blog.

To create an award badge, simply type or paste the URL of the image you want to use into the ‘Award image/icon’ field. For more information, please see our guide on how to get the URL of images you upload in WordPress.

After that, find the ‘Award those with at least’ box and type in the number of comments that visitors must post in order to get the award.

When you’re happy with how the top commenter widget is set up, make sure to click the ‘Update’ button to save your changes.

Now, if you visit your website you’ll see the top commenters listed in the sidebar.

We hope this article helped you learn how to display your top commenters in your WordPress sidebar. You may also want to see our guide on how to create a free business email address and our expert picks of the must have WordPress plugins for your business site.

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