Comments are a big part of any blog. They’re not only a place where readers can leave feedback and interact with one another, but they’re also a great marketing tool. Show someone a blog post that has dozens, or better yet hundreds, of comments and they’re likely to be more impressed with your work. It’s a signal that you’re popular, and everyone wants to be around someone who’s popular.

There are plenty of articles that deal with how to get more blog comments. This is not one of them. Instead, it’s what to do when your blog already gets a lot of comments. If you run a blog on WordPress things can get dicey when you get hundreds of comments per day. Once your each that point you’ll have to seriously consider switching to a third party commenting system.

WordPress commenting problems

For small volume blogs, the native WordPress commenting system is just fine. It allows for nesting replies, and users have a good deal of control over how their comments appear. Even older blogs with lots of posts will get by as long as they don’t get a ton of comments on each post.

Problems arise, however, when large volume blogs get hundreds of comments per day. WordPress builds a comment database, and blogs that get a lot of comments will see that database grow rapidly. Over time that becomes an enormous database that can impact site performance. Higher load times, frequent crashes, and greater bandwidth consumption all result from unwieldy comment databases.

This is exactly what happened on one of my high-traffic sites. In many ways it relies on comments to continue growing. But in its five years of existence it has received over a million comments, and that database has grown to the point where we can no longer handle it. There was a point last year when the site would go offline twice a week. It left us in a tough spot.

Using a third-party system

Early in our site’s existence we were contacted by Disqus, which provides a WordPress commenting solution. After listening to their pitch we researched their services a bit more, and looked at other platforms such as Intense Debate. But at the time we just weren’t interested. We had just installed a WordPress plugin that enabled threaded comments (before it was a native WordPress feature). But years later we wish we used a third-party platform from the beginning. It would have saved a lot of hassle.

When you use a third party commenting system, your comments use their datacenter solutions rather than your own. That takes the load off of your own servers. If the load from your comments isn’t on your servers, it means you won’t have to deal with those enormous comments databases that can slow your site to a crawl. We could have avoided so many issues over the years if we’d just listened to these pitches at the start. But now we’re behind the curve.

Alternatives

Of course, using a third-party commenting system isn’t the only solution to comment database problems. No, my site went an alternative route. Rather than use Disqus, which contained some features that we did not like, we decided to throw money at the problem. We hired a technician to evaluate our site and trim any possible fat, so we could improve our load times. We also bought some extra server space and moved the comments database to a new server.

Many sites don’t have this option, though. In fact, we were pretty foolish to do it ourselves. That cost us good money, and every month we pay that much more for our hosting costs. The solution works just fine, and in terms of results we’re happy. But it would have been nicer if we’d just gone with the third-party commenting system in the first place.

Pitfalls

Third party commenting systems aren’t perfect. Even after we realized our comment database problems, we still didn’t switch to one. That was for a number of reasons.

• Familiarity. Our commenters were used to the system we had implemented. We did not want to upset our readers by changing the system.
• Features. Thumbs upping and thumbs downing comments is not something we wanted to implement. Any comments section that has a pack mentality will be all the worse for it.
• Price. While Disqus covers smaller sites for free, we’d likely have to pay a monthly fee to use the service. We preferred to spend that money on more server space, which we could use for many different purposes.

On the whole, though, for young sites I’d still recommend getting off the native WordPress comments and onto a third party system. With so many potential problems in the future, any comment-centric blog should definitely make the switch early. Doing so will make your comments much easier to manage, and will also prevent your database from growing too large. Given all the problems we’ve had over the years, I couldn’t possibly recommend it any more.

Joe Pawlikowski writes and edits several blogs across the web, including Prepaid Reviews, which focuses on prepaid wireless services.