Thrive Comments Review 2023: Best WordPress Comments Plugin?

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Thrive Comments Review Summary
TypeWordPress comments plugin
Price$19 for 25 sites
Plugin DetailsFast loading
Boosts engagement
auto link keywords
Rating4.7/5
Thrive comments review 2023: Best WordPress comments plugin
Thrive Comments Review 2023: Best WordPress Comments Plugin

Before continuing with this unbiased Thrive Comments review, raise your hand if you think…

…that the most easily-achievable website engagement (read blog comments) is also often the most underrated system of engagement.

Blog comments are easy to get, and often the first sign of interaction that a visitor has with you after reading your posts.

And what do we do after that?

Either dump it into a heap of previously approved comments or at most leave a reply back to it.

Nothing else! (Until now)

In this Thrive  Comments review, I’ll show you how you can turn your blog comments into the highest converting asset of your blog.

Be it sales, engagement, affiliate marketing, reduce bounce rates, book a consultation (lead generation) and even better build a platform!

Excited?

Here’s the thing:

The default WordPress commenting system is good enough but only if you want to dump comments.

Convert those commenters, it simply won’t help.

The WordPress plugin repository is filled with lots of comment plugins for WordPress and while some of them are really good like for functions like removing spam (Akismet) and integrating social media comments (like this Facebook comment plugin).

But if you need a blog commenting plugin that does something more, the WordPress repository just falls short.

What’s Next?

[toc]

Before proceeding with the review here’s a little proof to show I own a Thrive Themes Membership for more than 5 years now and have been using Thrive Comments for more than 3 years on multiple sites that I own.

All views (including the pros and cons of Thrive Comments plugin) shown in this review are my own experience as a paying customer.

Thrive Comments Review 2023: Best WordPress Comments Plugin?

Thrive comments is the new conversion-optimized commenting plugin by Thrive themes that:

  1. Encourages more comments by taking the goodness of social media (likes/upvotes, pinning the top comment, and sharing of comments) and rewarding active commenters with badges (helps you build a strong community).
  2. Helps you convert comments by after-post actions like showing them additional posts to read (dramatically reduces bounce rates), ask for a social share, ask them to join you on your social media platform, show them an exclusive coupon or affiliate product (more sales) or an optin form (lead generation) to name a few.

The guys behind Thrive themes have built their entire WordPress business based on one single goal; enabling WordPress users to build a conversion-optimized site.

At a time when everyone is addicted to social media and its instant rewarding feature (though likes, shares, upvotes, and trophies or badges) it’s kinda not enough to lure a blog visitor to take the time to write a comment.

The Thrive comments plugin takes this loophole in the existing best comment plugins and brings the facilities of upvoting a comment, featuring a top comment, and awarding the active commenters with badges to reward their loyalty to infuse a sense of community.

Thrive comments review: Award badges to commenters
Use Thrive Comments to reward active commenters with badges

And what’s in it for me?

Well the sense of community building itself is the best thing that the plugin can reward but it probably isn’t the only best thing.

There’s no sense of building a community of readers unless you can leverage that to turn your blogging business into getting even more interaction, more page views, more sales, and more leads.

Checkout More Such Features! ››

Thrive Comments Features Review

Let’s now take a close look at the features that make it the best WordPress comments plugin of the year.

What Thrive comments plugin offers, how it can help you get more for your comments, and finally if Thrive comments plugin is something worth investing in and switching to.

Please Note:

Read through these features to see how thrive comments plugin can boost your website sales (affiliate sales/product sales or service business) and get you more subscribers.

Prefer to watch a video instead?

Watch this video where Stephanie walks you through all the features of Thrive Comments and 12 ways to use it on your blog.

YouTube video

Get Thrive Comments For Your Blog ››

1) Encourage Readers to Leave a Comment (and Build a Community)

Comments on a blog are a sign people have related to your content. The response shows that what your content matters and your readers want to discuss more on it (either for the topic or against it). 

Any conversation is a good conversation, especially at a time when people are investing boatloads of money for getting people to talk about your content through social media ads or Adwords etc.

Professional bloggers like Michael Hyatt who had once stopped comments have decided to bring them back. This is the power of community building through comments.

Michael Hyatt comment community

Thrive comments take this idea of community fostering a step further.

Thrive comments help you leverage the power of social media and community forums in your comment system.

With thrive comments, you can ask your visitors to leave comments on your site using their social media accounts without even having to log in. This makes commenting frictionless and easy.

Thrive comments review: allow social media sign in for comments in WordPress
Allow comments to sign in via social media platforms

The old WordPress commenting system with email and site id is still there but in case you are searching for how to disable site URL feature in WordPress comments, thrive comments lets you do that in a click.

2) Comment Moderation Made Easy

If you’re a site that gets a lot of comments or you have a multiple-author site with post comments for different authors, managing and sorting comments might be a hassle.

With Thrive comments WordPress commenting plugin, you can now have a streamlined WordPress comment moderation system.

Thrive comments review: Allow specific roles to moderate site comments
Site comment moderation made easy

You can sort (with keyboard shortcuts) and moderate comments on the following basis:

  • Sort comments from only your posts,
  • Sort comments that still need a reply
  • Sort comments based on a single post or page.
  • Allot certain comments to certain authors for more relevant action.

3) Convert WordPress Comments Into Engagement and Interaction

With Thrive comments, you can now display post-comment features to increase your website engagement, reduce bounce rates, get more social shares, and more.

1) Redirect commenters to a custom landing page: With Thrive comments plugin you can redirect commenters to a custom thank you or welcome landing page.

With the custom landing page, you can:

  • Give a custom thank you message
  • Introduce them to your community and ask them to join your social media platforms
  • Show them a free optin freebie
  • Upsell an affiliate product
  • Show them your popular posts (and thus lure them to become your fans)

You can see the landing page that I have built for my commenters to direct them to a page where, I thank them, give them a freebie (SEO checklist) and ask them to join my social community.

This is the way I use my comments to increase interaction and engagement on my blog.

Free alternative: Yoast comments hack is a free plugin to redirect first-time commenters to a custom landing page. (I had been using this till today but it only redirects first-time commenters so there are limitations)

4) Take Feedback: Add a Survey Form to Show to Your Commenters

Ever wondered how important getting feedback from your readers is?

You might include a feedback form on your blog via other means but another way to get maximum responses to blog survey forms is to show it to the commenters.

Why?

Because they are the ones who have taken the time to read your content fully, leave a comment either praising you or giving you their feedback, and hence they are easier to convince to leave feedback.

You can convert the “micro-commitment” of commenters to ask them for additional feedback like what posts they like to read next, how are they liking your content, and how they think you can improve it.

Thrive comments plugin makes all this possible and you even get to store the responses into a Google spreadsheet for easy data consumption.

The next some points will help you turn your blog comments into profitable page views!

How, you ask?

Read the next feature…

5) Leverage Comments to Get More Page Views (Reduce Blog Bounce Rate)

While none of the WordPress comments plugins has ever thought of doing something more than just comments, how would it be if you could use comments to get more page views?

Yes! You heard that right.

With Thrive comments plugin, you can easily show a bunch of related posts to the commenters after they have commented and this is where you got an active spot of interaction and the potential to engage the reader to read a new post.

how to set related posts in thrive comments
Set related posts in Thrive comments

Since the current post was so effective that the reader decided to leave a comment, a related post is probably the best way to capture the reader’s attention.

How can it help you?

With this thrive comments feature, you can use comments to boost your website pageviews and reduce bounce rate.

BONUS:  If you run a viral website or a website that is monetized by ads you can probably use this tactic to increase the revenue of your website easily.

Get Thrive Comments For Your Blog ››

Use Thrive Comments to Generate More Leads & Affiliate Sales

Until now, WordPress comment plugins had no role in blog monetization.

But with thrive comments, you can turn your army of blog commenters to list building and more sales.

With Thrive comments you can increase your blog revenue in the following ways:

1) Show an Exclusive Coupon for Those Who Comment

You can show your visitors an exclusive coupon to try your products or any affiliate product you are a partner of.

How I use it?

I use it to let my commenters know that they can get a SEMrush 30-day free trial worth $99.95.

How to show coupons and affiliate offers in thrive comments
How to show affiliate offers and exclusive coupons using thrive comments

How does it help?

  • Boosts my authority: Only a handful of elite partners can offer SEMrush a 30-day free trial coupon.
  • Makes money: With every paid upgrade, I get affiliate commissions.
  • A sense of gratitude and loyalty: Every free gift trickles a feeling of gratitude into your readers’ minds and they become your loyal fans.

2) Show Them an Optin Form

You can use thrive comments to trigger an optin form so that you can increase the chances to get leads.

You can show a sitewide optin form or use a specific content upgrade offering a PDF version of the post or some specific offers to bribe your readers into your list.

Also read:

3) Show a Webinar Signup Form

Thrive comments easily integrates with Thrive leads (or your favorite lead generation plugin) to show up a quick webinar sign-up form and generate leads.

4) Show Up an Affiliate Banner

Now that sidebar blindness is at its peak you cannot expect to grab any eyeballs to your ad banners with traditional ad placements.

This is the cause of a drastic decrease in ad clicks and thus affiliate sales.

Check the image below for the heat map generated in research for fast-scan reading, normal reading speed, and thorough reading (right).

Heatmap computer eye movement depiction

But with Thrive comments comment form, you can increase the effective attention to get some eyeballs on your most lucrative affiliate offers.

Just as the reader is fully attentive to your blog, and has formed an attachment in the form of leaving a comment, an affiliate banner or product offer would be the best that can grab his attention.

Use Thrive comments to display a banner right after your reader has left a comment. You can also set up a fun GIF image that showcases your brand’s personality.

Check Thrive Comments In Action ››

How Thrive Comments Boosts User Experience of Commenters

1) WordPress plugin that shows comments analytics

The best thing in this thrives comments review is, the comment analytics feature.

Your comments are a great way to analyze how your readers are interacting with your blog. Getting thorough analytics of it can help you optimize your site even better.

With thrive comments, you can get total analytics of:

  • Word cloud: See what most of your visitors say
  • Comment rates over time: This helps you see the number of comments you are getting and how it has grown (or decreased) with time.
  • Voting stats and more.

2) Fastest Loading WordPress Comment Plugin With Lazy Load Feature

I hope I don’t need to tell you that site speed is a ranking factor.

Thrive Comments plugin comes with an inbuilt lazyload feature to make your site faster. Thrive comments plugin also makes sure that your comments are indexable by Google and other search engines even with the lazy load feature turned on.

Thrive comments plugin has the option to load comments only when the reader reaches the point of the comments section.

This helps in saving the load time of unwanted text and gravatar images for those who aren’t ready to comment.

Thrive comments review with lazyload comment system
Disable or lazy-load comment Gravatars to enhance site-speed

You can also, lazy load Gravatars so that they only load when they come to the viewport thereby preventing the load times of unneeded Gravatars of other commenters.

3) Thrive Comments Spam Filter Features

If you’re worried about how to handle spam comments with Thrive comments plugin, it has got your back.

Thrive comments plugin comes with an inbuilt spam filter much like Akismet (one more plugin to discard!) that keeps spam comments at bay.

You also get to moderate all comments from a single dashboard that is keyboard optimized (meaning you can reply, delete, and delegate comments, all without lifting your finger or clicking the mouse).

You can also filter comments based on pages or posts they are made on, keywords used by commenters, reply status etc to make comments spam moderation a breeze.

Checkout This Feature Now! ››

Thrive Comments Pricing Review 2023

Thrive comments costs $19 per month for a 25-site license… but… here’s the deal:

Thrive comments plugin, like any other Thrive plugin, now comes as a part of Thrive suite which gives you access to all revolutionary Thrive plugins like Thrive Architect, Thrive Leads Thrive Ultimatum amongst others as a part of the deal.

As a part of the recent Thrive Themes Pricing structure, they have discontinued selling their plugins individually and hence if you want to leverage any Thrive plugins, you need to get Thrive Themes membership.

Thrive Comments pricing review

If you’re only looking to get the comments plugin the pricing might sound a bit off.

However, if you want to grow your blog then Thrive Suite can help you do so much more on your blog like getting email subscribers, creating high-converting landing pages, and a lot more.

Refund Policy: They offer you a 30-Day money-back guarantee so go ahead and try their plugins and if you think they’re not for you, ask for a refund. You have nothing to lose.

Checkout The New Pricing Structure ››

Thrive Comments Support & Customer Care Review

Thrive Comments is part of a great community of Thrive themes users and I have been a paying customer of them for a long.

Needless to say, their response rates are awesome and you can get help, in no time.

Thrive themes has always a responsive customer care. You can expect a reply on your thread in a couple of hours.

How to Increase Blog Comments?

In order to take maximum advantage of Thrive comments, you need to have a decent number of blog comments.

If you want to increase your blog comments and convert them using Thrive comments watch this super short video of Neil Patel where he explains how to get more blog comments effortlessly.

Thrive Comments Review – Best WordPress Comments Plugin 2023

I hope you enjoyed this thrive comments review. In my opinion, thrive comments plugin is the best WordPress commenting plugin ever.

It has lazy load (that lowers your blog loading time), reduces the bounce rate (by showing related posts), collects emails, offers badges, upvotes, etc. for commenters (to spur engagement), and makes comment moderation a breeze, to name a few.

Checkout Thrive Comments Now! ››

How do you think this is going to change the game of WordPress comments plugins?

Let us know if you have any doubts about our Thrive Comments review and we can help you.

1. Is Thrive Comments worth it?

Thrive comments help you speed up your website, makes commenting a better experience for readers, and even let you collect emails or leads directly from comments. It is definitely worth it.

2. How do you use Thrive Comments?

Thrive Comments is a WordPress plugin. After purchasing your copy, search for “Thrive Dashboard” on your admin panel. Choose “Thrive Comments” from the left sidebar and then click on the “activate Thrive Comments sitewide” option under the “general settings section. That’s it. Feel free to play around with other options to customize the functionalities of the plugin.

3. Is Thrive Comments compatible with page builders?

Thrive comments is completely compatible with page builders like Elementor, Divi, and Thrive architect. It also seamlessly works with most WordPress blog themes like Elegant themes

4. Thrive Comments Alternatives?

Thrive comments don’t have an alternative that does most of what it does. However, you can try Disqus, Postmatic, or Jetpack to enhance the experience of the WordPress native comments system.

Thrive Comments Review 2023

Swadhin Agrawal

Loading speed
Usability
Features
Pricing

Summary

Thrive Comments is a very lightweight solution to native WordPress comments and has features to reduce spam, load on viewport, offer subscription forms, make commenting fun by gamifying it, etc.

4.8

DigitalGYD content is free. When you purchase through referral links on our site, we may earn a small commission.

Hi, I'm Swadhin Agrawal, founder, and editor-in-chief of DigitalGYD. DigitalGYD is a multiple-times award-winning blog where we aim at helping bloggers how to start a blog and grow it into a profitable online business.

I'm a professional blogger for a decade now and am the founder of Value Intent Media Pvt. Ltd., a media company that creates content for a multi-million-sized audience across various verticals.

Our research & content on DigitalGYD is often referred to by brands like The Telegraph, Forbes, Times of India, Yahoo! Finance, HuffPost, Bluehost, Neil Patel, The Next Web, etc.

1 thought on “Thrive Comments Review 2023: Best WordPress Comments Plugin?”

  1. Gaja Lakshmi

    Thrive comments helps to engage visitors and reduces bounce rate.
    I like Thrive Themes and my site looks cool with Thrive comments. :)

Comments are closed.