How to: thank your readers when they comment

When users take the time and effort to add a comment to one of your posts, wouldn’t you like to thank them about it? Here aretwo different methods to thank your users after they commented.

Redirect them to a Thank you page

The first obvioous solution is to bring them to a new page, where you thank them, and call for further action: keep reading, subscribe via RSS, Like the website on Facebook…

It can be done quite easily by adding a few lines to the functions.php file of your theme. There, replace the URL by the URL of the WordPress page you have created for that purpose.

I would advise you to create a custom page thanks to a page template. Thus you can add some more functionalities to this special landing page.

// Redirect to thank you page after commenting
function werewp_thanks_commenting() {
    return 'http://domain.com/thank-you';
}
add_action('comment_post_redirect', 'werewp_thanks_commenting');

You can have a look at the example of Yoast, and his thank you page.

Send them an email to get in touch with them

As for everything about WordPress, there is always a plugin for that!

Simply install Thank me Later, customize the message you want to send, and you are done!

Do you use one of these methods on your blog? Do you have other ideas to thank people who take the time to comment on your blog? Share it with us!