4 Enhancements to Improve Your Blog’s Comments Section

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Comments are probably one of the most important methods to attain reader feedback and to improve the community aspect of your blog. By encouraging comments and utilizing them to their fullest potential, your blog can see tremendous growth and activity. So how do you optimize your blog’s comments section? Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve tweaked my comments file to allow for 4 enhanced features: 1: separation between comments and trackbacks, 2: threaded comments while keeping the same theme, 3: distinguished author comments using a different style, and 4: subscription to comments by email. In this article, I’ll describe the benefits of each change as well as how you can implement the improvements on your own blog.

Separate trackbacks from comments

Since trackbacks don’t usually add to the direct conversation of a particular post, I find it more efficient to separate them from comments altogether. That way you’ll easily be able to see how many links the post is getting as well as having a clean display of the conversation taking place. I don’t know of any Wordpress plugins that do this automatically but Daily Blog Tips offers a detailed set of step-by-step instructions on how to separate trackbacks from comments on your WordPress blog. I highly recommend you make this change.

Enable threaded comments on your blog

One of the major limitations in Wordpress is the inability to directly respond to a specific comment. By default, all comments are at the same level and it’s not possible to answer a question directly unless you use something like “@reader”. This is a clunky method that will oftentimes lead to replies never being seen. To combat this limitation, a Wordpress plugin called Brian’s Threaded Comments effectively changes the structure of the comments file to allow for nesting. Through the use of the plugin, conversations in comments flow much better. However, the plugin by default does not match your blog’s theme and I recommend you adapt it to fit your own custom design. If you’re not much of a coder, you can always hire someone to do it for you over at the Digital Point Forums. Anthony Tang helped me with mine for $40 and he did a great job.

Distinguish author comments with a different style

As the author and owner of your blog, you want to be sure that your voice is heard both in your posts and in your comments. However, when commenting on your own blog, your message will usually get lost in the sea of reader feedback. How do you distinguish your messages to make sure they stand out from the rest? I recently discovered a Wordpress plugin called Author Highlight that will allow you to set different style attributes for comments made by authors. I chose to use a subtle gray background for my comments but you might want to experiment with a bolder approach.

Subscribe to comments by email

With the huge amount of blogs readily available on the Internet, commentators will rarely remember to check back to a specific site to see if their comments have been replied to. How do you get them to come back for more? A Wordpress plugin called Subscribe to Comments allows readers to receive email messages every time a post that they’ve commented on is updated with a new message. This is definitely a must-have plugin.

The four enhancements mentioned above can do wonders for your blog’s commenting. It’ll be easier for your readers to communicate with you and they’ll thank you by being more active and by creating a bustling community. I recommend you try the changes out. What other improvements can be made to the comments section? I’d like to hear your thoughts so be sure to leave a comment here.