Best WordPress Comment Form

What is the Best WordPress Comment Form?

Everyone says it’s important to engage with your website users in order to build your brand and make more sales. Blog comment threads are a great way to engage with site users, because they give you information on what your visitors are interested in, and may allow you to go into more depth about specific concepts than you could do in an ordinary blog post.

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Lively comment threads can be terrific for keeping people on your website longer.

Perhaps you would love to engage with blog comments, but don’t get very many of them. You can’t very well engage in comment threads if there are no comments. At the same time you want to make it easy for people to comment so they won’t be discouraged from doing so, and you want to keep the spam comments out because they’re a needless distraction and should be weeded out.

If you run a WordPress website, you have many options for what type of comment form to include. How do you know which one is best?

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Comment Form Plugins

A whole industry has grown up around WordPress plugins, and they have made life infinitely easier for website owners who don’t have the resources to hire someone to customise their site. There are shopping cart plugins, SEO plugins, security plugins, lead generation plugins and many more. You can also use a number of different comment form plugins.

Be wary of specialised comment form plugins for WordPress. It’s not that they’re bad, but they are often unnecessary and can end up making it harder for your site visitors to leave comments. When site users perceive “friction” between their keyboard and a comment showing up on your site, many of them simply won’t bother. Disqus, for example, requires commenters to log into their Disqus account before commenting. Many people decide it’s too much trouble.

Here are a few popular WordPress comment form plugins:

Default WordPress Comment Form

For most sites, the default WordPress comment form is best. It’s easier for you, because you don’t need to select and install a specialised plugin. It’s also easier for your commenters because there’s less friction in the commenting process.

You don’t want commenting to be so easy that bots can do it, however.

But while you want to make things easy for human commenters, you don’t want to log in every day only to find a pile of spam comments, because these may make it appear that you aren’t paying attention to your comment threads. Therefore you need a way to allow your visitors to use the default WordPress comment form, whilst still keeping bots and spammers out.

This is what we recommend!

Prevent WordPress Comment Form Spam

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One popular choice for combatting spam is installing the free WordPress reCAPTCHA Integration plugin, which allows you to activate CAPTCHA in login, registration, comments, or any combination of the three.

The old-style reCAPTCHA plugin verified that the user was human rather than robot by requiring him or her to decipher nonsense text rendered in a warped, stylised image. The problem is, a lot of bots can solve these and people find them annoying. No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA replaces that with a simple check box (and scrambled letters if the plugin doubts the user’s humanity).

Conclusion

You may think that because there is such a variety of specialty WordPress plugins today that you should use them rather than the defaults. In some cases that’s true, and sometimes there aren’t default WordPress plugins so you have to use third-party plugins.

But if you want to get more comments on your site so you can engage your readers more effectively, you want to make it as easy as possible for humans to comment without enabling bots to clog up your comment feeds. Using the default WordPress comment form along with a reCAPTCHA plugin to repel spam comments is the best solution for most site owners.

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Comments
  1. Yakshit Bose on January 27, 2022

    First of all, thank you for providing useful information. In this blog content, I got information about what is default WordPress comment form and much other related information as well.

    Reply
  2. Shaon Adnan on December 20, 2017

    Nice post. I learn one thing more challenging on different blogs everyday. It is going to all the time be stimulating to learn content material from different writers and observe slightly something from their store.
    Thanks for sharing.

    Reply
  3. Gary on May 15, 2015

    Excellent point. I very much agree. Thanks for writing this. 🙂

    Reply

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