How to Customize the WordPress Comment Form

Engagement is valuable in any platform, whether it’s through social media or your WordPress site.

The more comments that visitors leave on posts, the more likely it is that they will return to read and share your future updates and engage in discussions with you, and other visitors to your site. Eventually, if people like your site enough, a community may grow around it, nurtured by the people who frequently leave comments and start conversations about your posts.

Before all of this happens, however, you have to make sure that your content is good enough that visitors to your site will want to talk about it, and that your comment form is inviting and easy to use.

In order to make your comment form appealing, it would be useful to customize it instead of just using a basic layout. With enough tweaking, visitors to your site will be able to use their social media accounts to login and comment, turn on the option to receive alerts regarding the comment thread on a particular post, and much more.

In order to customize the WordPress comment form on your website, you will need to go to the Discussion Settings tab in the WordPress Admin Dashboard.

Go to Settings, then click Discussion.

In the Discussion Settings page you can change various settings, such as what commenters should fill out before being able to post, whether they should be logged in to comment, how many threads or nested comments are allowed, and whether the latest or oldest comments should be shown first.

You can also choose to place a button that allows commenters to receive updates regarding their posts (Follow comments), or to follow your blog.

Avatars can also be customized using the Discussion Settings menu.

You can choose whether to allow a commenter’s avatar to be shown, and what the default image should be if they do not have custom avatars. You can also specify what text to use to invite users to leave comments on the page. If you wish to further customize the comment form, you will need to edit the CSS code of your WordPress site.

In order to style the comments form, you need to either add your CSS code to your WordPress theme stylesheet, or modify the code of an existing theme’s comments.php template file.

You will need to modify the array of comment_form(), for example, and specify values.

To illustrate, the code for the Twenty Fourteen theme’s comment form is as follows:

 
  

 
    Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked*
 
  
 
  
 
  

 
    
 
      Name*
 
    
 
    
 
    
 
  
 
  

 
    
 
      Email*
 
    
 
    
 
    
 
  
 
  

 
    
 
      Website
 
    
 
    
 
    
 
  
 
  

 
    
 
      Comment
 
    
 
    
 
     
    
 
  
 
  
 
  

 
    You may use these 
 
    
 
      HTML
 
    
 
    tags and attributes:  
 
    
 
          
         
 
    
 
  

 
  
 
  

 
    
 
    
 
    
 
  
 

$args = array(
 
        'comment_field' => '
' . _x( 'Comment', 'noun' ) . '
'
 
  'fields' => apply_filters( 'comment_form_default_fields', array(
 

 
    'author' =>
 
      '
' .
 
      '' . __( 'Name', 'domainreference' ) . ' ' .
 
      ( $req ? '*' : '' ) .
 
      '
',
 

 
    'email' =>
 
      '
' . __( 'Email', 'domainreference' ) . ' ' .
 
      ( $req ? '*' : '' ) .
 
      '
',
 

 
    'url' =>
 
      '
' .
 
      __( 'Website', 'domainreference' ) . '' .
 
      '
'
 
    )
 

 
);
 
comment_form( $args );