How to Migrate WordPress Comments Away From Disqus
If you haven't heard the announcement, Disqus, is going to start charging $10 per month, per site.
Disqus is one of the most popular commenting systems in the world. However, they have a terrible attitude towards customers.
OSTraining covered the awful rollout of Disqus' “Reveal” advertising platform. WPBeginner wrote a rundown of some major problems with Disqus, which include inserting affiliate links and sponsored comments without permission.
Now, with just a few weeks notice, they're going to charge $10 per site per month, or require you run their awful ads on your site. Here's what the ads look like:
So, how can you remove Disqus from your WordPress sites? The answer is really, really easy. Just disable the Disqus plugin.
- Go to the “Plugins” area on your WordPress site.
- Click “Deactivate” under “Disqus Comment System”.
Now check your site. All your comments will still be showing. However, the comments will now be using the default WordPress comment system.
I guess some kudos is due to Disqus for working closely with the WordPress core, which makes the removal process easy.
The Postmatic team has one additional piece of advice:
If you're in doubt as to whether all of your comments have been synced, the Disqus Conditional Load plugin offers the ability to download your Disqus comments and store them locally in WordPress.
We've removed Disqus from all our sites. Where are we going next? We're not 100% sure, but we're testing the Epoch plugin and it's working out great so far.
Do you have any suggestions for good Disqus alternatives on WordPress?
Thanks for the shout-out, Steve! if you want to add super nice comment notifications to Epoch (or any native WordPress comment setup) you can do so with Replyable. It is free to use for comment notifications, or throw a few bucks at it and the notifications become two-way (users can reply to an email to leave a followup comment… just like github or basecamp).
We actually make a ton of commenting plugins. Check them out at http://gopostmatic.com/about#plugins
Best,
Jason
Congrats, Jason. We’ll definitely give Replyable a test.
Thanks for the great information Steve, I was thinking that it will be really tough to migrate from Disqus to the default comment version of WordPress, but after reading this post I was really surprised. How any plugin developer would develop a plugin which can be deleted without any hassle. Most of the plugins nowadays have very complex integration so that once it’s installed, people can not easily remove them. But Disqus is an exception in this.