An important section to a website comes after the content of it – that’s right: comments. The truth of the matter with comments is that bloggers are split by it, as to whether they should disable them or let their audience comment. It’s an interesting debate because the answer to ‘should you disable comments or not?’ is the same as any good question, ‘it depends’. Here are some of the things you will need to think about before looking to disable comments.

How much traffic does your website receive?

New websites will struggle to gain comments at first. Let’s say for every 1,000 visitors, 850 read the first paragraph of your content. Of them 850, 400 read to the very last word of your content. Of them 400, 100 click away after reading. Another 100 click to an internal link on your website they see. Of the remaining 200, only 1% might comment on your content – that’s a couple of people per 1,000 visits. Comments don’t happen often. If you don’t have much traffic, you won’t notice any benefit from enabling comments, simply because you haven’t got enough traffic to warrant, on average, a a couple of comments a day at least. I only started to notice daily comments on my website when hitting 50,000 visitors a month. But, again, this depends on a lot of factors, such as the below points.

What type of content do you have?

The type of content you have on your website makes a big difference to if you should enable comments on not. If you are a news site, then you might not want comments, since a lot of the topics are quite controversial and could start arguments. On the other hand, a blog about recipes might welcome comments, to share knowledge about cooking with other like-minded individuals.

What level of conversation are you aiming for?

Are you informing the web user or sharing your knowledge/opinion? You will be doing one or the other. If you are doing the first, then you should really disable comments. If you are the latter, then your content is actually a two way conversation. Therefore, with this, it is extremely important to enable commenting.

Do you want to better your content?

The best thing I have found about enabling commenting is that your audience provides the best market research. They will let you know when you have typos you did not find in your content. They will tell you what was good about the content, and bad as well. Many will disregard the bad comments. However, it is these comments that are transparent in opinion about your content – take note of them and make yourself a better blogger from them.

One of my websites, poemanalysis.com, stemmed literally from a comment requesting an analysis of a poem on askwillonline.com – a light bulb turned on in my head and so a website was born.