Last Updated on January 26, 2022
If you’re looking for ways to get more comments on your site, I found a comments stat about WordPress blogs you may hate to read!
Many newbie bloggers consider comments from their readers to be a major indication of success. For that matter, some veteran bloggers feel the same way. I found an article about 10 WordPress statistics businesses should pay attention to. It was a comments stat that really surprised me.
More on that in a moment.
Believe me, I understand the temptation to use comments as a measure of blogging success. But those of who maintained blogs for a while — and mine has been going for more than 17.5 years — have witnessed a gradual decline in comments.
Many blogs, including some high-profile sites, decided to do away with blog comments altogether. I suspect the main reason for that is because they don’t want readers to see how few actually take the time to respond. Some claim their reason is because of the extreme amount of comment spam. But there are plugins that can drastically cut nearly all comment spam, so that excuse always struck me as a copout.
In any case, let’s move on to the topic at hand.
Here’s that comments stat I was talking about.
In his article, “Top 10 WordPress Stats And Facts Every CFO Should Know,” Marius Vetrici says that every month, WordPress users produce about 70 million new posts.
That in itself could be discouraging for new bloggers. When you think about it, the new post you’re going to write next will have that many posts to compete against for your readers’ attention.
Yes, maybe discouraging was the wrong word. Maybe you could see it as downright depressing!
But hold on to your seat: it gets worse! Along with those 70 million new posts each month, those WordPress users receive approximately 77 million new comments per month.
Note that this does not mean that every post gets that many comments. If you do simple math, you’ll see that this leaves an average of just 1.7 comments per post per month.
You may safely assume that blogs with a much larger readership than mine receive many more comments. They’re likely taking away my share of those 77 million comments — and yours, too!
I post an average of 16 new posts per month. That’s four posts a week, four weeks per month.
I suppose I should be delighted that in the past month, I’ve received more than 1.7 comments. (I’m not sure how you’d receive seven-tenths of a comment!)
But I definitely do not average 2 comments per post. That’d be nice, but I understand that these days, as fragmented and frazzled as we all are, comments aren’t near the priority for readers that they used to be.
Bloggers should definitely keep that in mind!
Don’t be discouraged by what sounds like an abysmal number of comments. There are other things, like page views, you’d be better served by following when you’re looking at your own site’s stats.