Is The Default WordPress Comment System Best for SEO?

WordPress has a variety of different commenting systems available, and they all have their pros and cons. I can’t tell you which one is the “best” because they all have their own merits. What I can do is give you an argument for why you might prefer the default comment system instead of one of the plugin options available.

The Pros and Cons of Default WordPress Comments

One of the biggest benefits of WordPress as a platform is the number of ways you can change it. Pretty much anything you could want, from changing the theme or skin of your site to changing how it functions at the most basic level, can be done with a plugin or a framework of some kind.

The problem is, this tends to give tunnel vision. Since WordPress can be tweaked to such an extreme level, a lot of us feel like we need to change it in every way possible. Why leave image SEO to the platform when you can use a plugin? Why use the default skins when you can use a custom theme? Why use the default comments when you can use some other comment plugin?

The fact is, there’s not necessarily anything wrong with the way things work on their own. Plenty of blogs - large blogs, even - run the default comment system, and it works just fine! There are some benefits to the default WordPress comments system.

The first benefit is loading speed. Any plugin you use will slow down your load times for your site in some way. The exception is something explicitly designed for speed, like a caching plugin. Comment plugins are very much not designed for speed; they’re designed to add more features.

This isn’t to say that WordPress comments are perfect already. You can take a few steps to speed them up and get more benefit out of them.

Compare to, say, Disqus, which has to load multiple scripts every time a user loads the page - it has its own CDN, its own authentication process, its own way of storing comments, and the rest.

Caching plugins also work with the default WordPress comment system, when they might not work with other commenting systems. A caching plugin won’t work with Facebook comments, because the data for Facebook comments is loaded from Facebook itself. Facebook has CDN servers and can load pretty fast. But it’s not static data that can be loaded with a simple cache.

WordPress default comments are also very SEO-friendly. One giant benefit to comments on your blog is the added SEO benefit of having all that extra content. Pages ranking in the top 10 results on Google have been found to have around 38% more comments than the ones ranking lower - a strong signal that comment engagement correlates with page authority. Deep, helpful comments with relevant conversation can go a long way towards turning a 2,000-word blog post into a page with more high quality content.

There’s also a cautionary real-world example worth mentioning here. The blog ShoutMeLoud replaced its default WordPress comment system with Google Plus comments and saw a 40% traffic drop in just two days. After reverting back to WordPress comments nine days later, traffic recovered - it’s a pretty clear illustration of how much SEO value can be tied up in your comment system choice.

This, of course, only matters if you put the effort into the comments. You need a community that will leave those kinds of high quality comments, and you’ll have to be involved with your community to respond to them and continue the discussions. You also need to be very active with moderating the comments you get, to remove the spam and poor quality comments. That’s not unique to WordPress comments, though; you need anti-spam and moderation for every comment system you might use.

Of course, the main reason WordPress comments are so SEO-friendly is basically that they are right there on the page. Disqus has had documented problems with comment indexing - comments don’t always load until later in the user’s browsing session, which means search engine crawlers don’t see them at all. They might as well be invisible to Google. Facebook’s comment system is even more problematic from an SEO standpoint: it loads inside an <iframe>, which means the user-generated keywords inside those comments don’t affect word count or rankings. Most search engines will not crawl <iframe> content - it’s a significant and often ignored SEO disadvantage.

The default WordPress comment system is, as you might expect, free and ad-free. You don’t need to pay for a plugin to get it working, and you don’t have to worry about some pageview limit or ad embeds. Disqus in particular runs ads on your content by default on its free plan, which makes your site look worse and hurts the user experience. You’ll need to pay to remove those ads.

From a technical perspective, the fact that default comments are stored and managed locally is a large benefit. Some comment plugins need you to log into a third party system or import comments if you want to manage them, which is an extra hassle you don’t want to have to deal with, and that’s also the case if you have hundreds of comments to manage - it’s not a problem for everyone, but it can be an annoyance.

Every comment plugin has some spam protection, with varying degrees of utility. The default comment system works with Akismet, which is in my experience a helpful anti-spam system. Facebook relies on Facebook’s own moderation systems. But if you’ve ever seen the comment section on a popular post, you know how well that tends to go. Some spam will slip through even the best filter, so this mostly comes down to preference.

One of the biggest benefits of the built-in comment system, to me, is how customizable it is. You can change every color, font, and size of the comment system with your own CSS or adjustments to the WordPress files involved - it’s pretty easy, and it means you can match your comments to your site well. Other comment plugins don’t allow this level of customization. Most only have a light theme and a dark theme, or allow you to set a few basic color options, but nothing more. Personally, I like it when my comments don’t stick out like a sore thumb.

It’s also worth mentioning that the WordPress comments system, being designed for WordPress and built in to WordPress, is not going to cause conflicts. Installing a plugin could give you problems with other plugins that use the same parts of your page.

On the SEO and link front, it’s also worth mentioning that WordPress automatically applies the rel="ugc" attribute to links left in comments. Google introduced the UGC (user-generated content) link attribute back in 2020 specifically to help crawlers understand the nature of links, and WordPress’s native implementation of that means you’re already taking care of comment link attribution correctly out of the box - no extra configuration needed.

Finally, it doesn’t require logging into any third party authentication system just to comment. Users can leave a comment with or without Gravatar, so the barrier to entry is a bit lower. The moderation burden is higher for that reason, but it’s still manageable.

There are, of course, a few downsides to the default WordPress comment system. For one thing, they’re very basic comments. You don’t have user profiles - even Gravatar is just avatars - and you don’t have much in the way of cross-blogger or user networking. That’s fine, of course, if you don’t care about building your own miniature social network on your posts. But you can still benefit from a third party integration in some circumstances.

You might also lose out on some comment analytics or on extra calls to action that some third party plugins give you. That said, with the SEO dangers and speed tradeoffs involved with most third party comment systems, the default option holds up remarkably well for most blogs.

Alternative Comment Systems

If you’re interested in spicing up your comments on a WordPress blog, you have different options. I still think that simpler is usually better, up until you have hundreds of comments per day that you’ll have to moderate. But at the end of the day the choice is yours.

Enhanced Native Comments. You can spice up your native comments with Jetpack or some of the other basic comment-improving plugins - this still runs on the baseline WordPress comment system, but gives you some extra features, back-end analytics, and so on. The downside is predominantly that you’re trading some speed for some minor benefits, but neither change is major.

Thrive Comments. Thrive Themes has a whole suite of paid plugins to improve WordPress, and one of them is a comments plugin - it can add some features like a social network; users are able to upvote or downvote other comments. It also can add badges and gamification features to further incentivize commenting on your site. You also have the option to sort comments by vote, which makes them fairly Reddit-like in organization. The downside to Thrive Comments is that it’s a paid system, with a license for one site running around $40.

Disqus. Disqus is one of the most well-known third party comment plugins. I don’t like it much - it has documented SEO indexing problems, it’s slower to load than native comments, and the free plan runs ads on your site. Still, it’s a familiar enough system that users already have accounts, so the barrier to entry isn’t huge. Just go in with eyes open about the tradeoffs.

wpDiscuz. A native-feeling comment plugin with a solid active install base - it’s focused on speed and responsive design instead of advanced social features, it works with Akismet and a handful of other popular comment-adjacent plugins, and it’s pretty reliable. The core plugin is free, with a paid advanced version available if you need more functionality. I see this as a solid alternative if you want something beyond the default system without the bloat of a third-party solution.

GraphComment. A smaller commenting plugin that turns your comment section into something closer to a self-contained threaded conversation interface, somewhat reminiscent of Reddit - it’s reasonably capable for mid-sized sites, though it has some limitations around themes and advanced features at scale. Pricing is steep for what you get, and given the free options available, it’s hard to justify for most bloggers.

CommentLuv. CommentLuv has had a contentious history - it was commonly used as a gray-hat SEO tool because it included followed links in comment profiles, which attracted spam. The plugin changed ownership and went through a period of uncertainty. As of now, its future remains vague and its active install base has shrunk considerably. I’d be careful recommending it to anyone starting fresh.

There are, of course, other comment plugin options you can research. The community changes fairly quickly, so it’s always worth doing a bit of digging to see what’s latest. And if you run a blog and you’ve tried out different comment systems, let me know in the comments what you’ve thought! What’s the best comment plugin you’ve used so far?