Are you hoping to figure out how to include recent comments to your WordPress sidebar?
In this article, we will talk about how you can easily show recent comments in WordPress sidebar, or any other areas of your website that are widget friendly.
Default Recent Comments Widget in WordPress
The good news is that WordPress comes with a ready-to-use built-in ‘recent comments’ widget which you can add to your sidebar.
All you have to do is go to ‘appearance’, and then ‘widgets’, and add ‘recent comments’ to your sidebar.
You can give your widget a title and choose the number of comments that you want on display. Once you’ve done this, you select the ‘save’ button to store all of your personal widget settings.
Now, you can check out your website, and see the ‘recent comments’ widget in action.
A Better Version of Recent Comments Widget
The only thing that we don’t love about the default ‘recent comments’ widget is it only shows comment author name and post title. This means that there’s not a lot of information about the comment itself, and the appearance is going to be very plain.
With this in mind, let’s take a look at how you can add a better ‘recent comments’ widget to your WordPress sidebar.
The first step is to install and activate the ‘recent comments’ plugin. Once you have activated it, go to ‘appearance’, then ‘widgets’, and add ‘recent comments’ to your sidebar.
‘Recent comments’ widget allows for a variety of different choices. Within these, you will discover the ability to ‘display author avatar’ as well as ‘comment excerpt’.
WordPress uses gravatar to display by default the avatar image of a comment’s author. The good news is that you can choose how big your gravatar image is and the how much information you include with it.
This means that you get to control how your recent comments appear in the widget.
Make sure that you select the ‘save’ button so that your widget settings get saved. Now you can visit your website to see what your recent comments look like in the sidebar.
You can also see the appearance of recent comments by editing CSS in your child theme or parent theme. You can make the most of the ‘CSS hero’ plugin which lets you change the appearance of any element on your site without writing any HTML or CSS.
What is a WordPress Sidebar?
A WordPress sidebar is a column that is provided by your selected theme where you can display information other than the main content on your website. Most free WordPress themes usually provides its users with at least one sidebar on the left-hand side or on the right-hand side of the home page.
The great news about WordPress is that even if you aren’t a natural website developer, you can do a lot to change the look and functionality of your WordPress sidebar.
As well as including recent comments on your sidebar, you can add your profile photo and bio as we have talked a little bit about above, so that you add a human element to your website.
You can also use the sidebar to make it really easy for visitors to search your website for specific features and tools, and you can use it to encourage people to sign up to your mailing lists, or to follow your blog.
If you have a lot of content on your website, you can use it to show off your most popular posts or most recent content, and you can also use it as a way to encourage visitors to check out the rest of your social media networks online as well.
What’s a Widget?
A widget is a tool that you add to your WordPress sidebar that can help you do all of the things we’ve talked about above.
If you are trying to add something to your sidebar that you can’t do through a widget, then you will most likely need to upgrade to a Business or e-Commerce plan to activate the plugin.
However, WordPress is built in such a way that the majority of plugins for sidebar utility will be free to use with their main plan, so unless you are trying to include something relatively obscure, you should be able to locate it and adapt your content for free.
