Improve Your WordPress Comments System

This guest post submitted by Alex Sysoef, Publisher of WordPress Web 2.0 Guide Blog and author of Web 2.0 Wealth System.

WordPress is without a doubt one of the most flexible scripts when it comes to pure functionality available straight out of the box and became blogging platform of choice for thousands of bloggers. People love it because it simply works!

But just because functionality is there and readily available doesn’t mean it can’t be improved. And that is where WordPress truly shines by supplying a wealth of plugins that allow us to take it beyond its intended use. Comments system is crucial to blog interaction and in this post I want to discuss how a few plugins can greatly enhance what is already available.

To make the process simple and meaningful we will take a staged approach and discuss which plugins apply at each stage and why.

Stage 1. Improve Administrative Tasks

Replying and controlling comments on your blog is a big part of daily blogging routine. And to make it simpler we will use a few plugins to streamline the process and prevent unneeded work.

Better Comments Manager is a superb plugin to streamline your tasks of replying to comments, controlling them and allows many functions not available in core. Some of the more notable would be threaded reply and listing all comments for specific post to manage them.

Spam Karma 2 is the best of the bread spam protection for your blog. Unfortunately comment spam is one of the biggest problems that we, as bloggers have to deal with and this plugin removes 99% of them. But what do you do with remaining? Use Bad Behavior plugin to remove an additional 0.9% and then you only have one or two comments every once in a while to delete. Not too shabby, huh?

Lucia’s Linky Love is another plugin you might want to consider if you believe that good comments should be rewarded by providing a full SEO enabled link to their blog. Allows you to reward your regular commentators on autopilot once you configure the options to your liking. I personally Do Follow links from good comments on my blog and this plugin is a great time saver to me.

Stage 2. Enhance Commenting Systems Front End

Brian’s Threaded Comments is a great replacement for standard comments template and gives people the ability to post replies not only to the post itself but also to other comments and in my personal blog it increased the amount of participation by allowing direct conversation.

Comment Love is a fairly new plugin that detects the commenters blog feed and adds the latest post from the author’s blog with a full link to at the end of the comment. This plugin takes the idea of link love to the next level and is responsible for nearly doubling the number of comments on my own blog.

Live Comment Preview generates auto preview of comments below the form and is one of my favorites, as it allows you to instantly see what your comment will look like. Anytime you can provide visual enhancement – you can increase the number of comments and this plugin does just that and does it well.

Subscribe to Comments is a plugin, I personally think should be integrated into the core. As a blogger I visit and comment on many blogs and I love the option to subscribe to comments on threads that caught my attention and allows me to receive notifications when new replies are posted. This plugin is a must have as it not only makes it simplier for your visitors to participate in discussion – it generates repeat traffic for you!

Once you complete installation and configuration of plugins listed above – your commenting system is taken far beyond its original design and your blog is a lot more interactive. But what perhaps is even more important you have just simplified many tasks for yourself and added new means of traffic generation.

While there are many more plugins that can be used to improve the commenting even further and I discuss many of them on my blog, plugins above I consider essential to every WordPress blog and hope you find them useful as well.

Thank you for visiting my blog. There are new posts here every day. Staying updated is easy: Just subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe to FREE eMail updates. Thanks for visiting!

Enjoyed this article?
Please subscribe to my RSS Feed!

Subscribe by Email
Get notified by email  on every new article!

The Latest From the Top Blogs About Blogging...