Better Recent Comments
Provides an improved Recent Comments widget and a shortcode to display your recent comments on any post or page.
4.6(17 reviews)
·2.0K+ active installs·Updated 2 years agoAs of April 2026, Better Recent Comments is a WordPress wpml plugin with 2.0K+ active installations and a 4.6/5 rating from 17 reviews. It has been downloaded 66K+ times in total. Requires WordPress 6.0+ and PHP 7.4+. Available on WordPress.org since 2016. Last updated 2 years ago — may have compatibility concerns. Downloads are up 9% this week. Top alternative: WP Editor Widget.
4.6/517 reviews
2.0K+active installs
66K+total downloads
10 yearssince 2016
Overview
The default Recent Comments widget is somewhat limited. Better Recent Comments improves on this by providing a more flexible widget with options to show the user’s actual comment, as well as show avatars and the ability to show or hide the comment date.
As well as the widget, there’s a handy shortcode you can use to display your recent comments. This is useful if you need to display comments somewhere other than your sidebar or footer, such as on your homepage. Simply add the shortcode [better_recent_comments].
That’s not all! The plugin is also WPML compatible, which means that the comments will be restricted to those in the current language. The default WordPress widget will list all recent comments, regardless of language, so you might end up with comments for German-…
Screenshots
Ratings & Reviews
4.617 reviews
5 ★
14
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Recent Reviews
Good but problematic ( no way to set excerpt length per widget/shortcode )
by tnn·4 years ago·3 replies
The author gave a solution ( unrelated to the plugin ) to modify the comment excerpt length (*) ALL ACROSS YOUR SITE 😂 , which is not really a solution, is extremely invasive and certainly not wanted by anyone looking to build a coherent user experience on their site.
Users should be able to set different excerpt lengths for each shortcode, that’s the bare minimum for any comment plugin. ( e.g. 10 words on “homepage” excerpts, 20 words on “profile page”, no limit on “all recent comments” page ).
Something like that.
A similar plugin : WordPress comment plus does that, but your plugin is better in terms of styling, so I’ll just have to deal with that shitty excerpt handicap for the time being.
///////////////////////////// the invasive “solution” ///
add_filter( ‘comment_excerpt_length’, function( $number_of_words ) {
return 50;
} );
- This topic was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by tnn.
Excellent
by bibblybob·4 years ago·1 reply
Looks perfect! Much better than the in-built WordPress widget. Well done!
Great – Better than Writing Your Own
by Rick Hellewell·4 years ago·1 reply
Although there are many ways to put a ‘recent column’ widget in your sidebar, this is the best. Easy to customize (read the docs for shortcode parameters), and insert a block that contains the shortcode with all of your desired options. Add a ‘<h3 class=widget-title>Recent Comments</h3>’ just above the shortcode to put a heading.
Great stuff !
Just what I needed.
by scopie·4 years ago·1 reply
Beautiful and simple.
Very happy with it
by Topher·4 years ago·1 reply
I used the default Recent Comments plugin and was dismayed by how ugly and uninformative it was. It doesn’t show the comments!
Better Recent Comments shows a nice avatar AND the actual comment. Perfect.
Download Trends
Today: 5Yesterday: 12This week: 48Period total: 3K
Compatibility
| WordPress | 6.0+ requiredTested up to 6.5.8 |
| PHP | 7.4+ required |
Version Adoption
v1.2
76.9%
v1.1
19.7%
v1.0
3.5%
Top Alternatives to Better Recent Comments
Frequently Asked Questions
Changelog
1.2.0
Release date 27 March 2024
* Fix notices in PHP 8.2
* Misc: Update author to Kestrel
Contributors
Plugin data sourced from WordPress.org. Analysis and metrics by PluginSift.