How to Highlight Author’s Comments in WordPress

Highlighting author comments in WordPress is a powerful way to boost engagement on your blog. When readers see an author actively participating in the discussion, they’re more likely to join the conversation themselves.

At WPBeginner, we’ve seen firsthand how this creates a sense of community and encourages interaction, ultimately leading to a more vibrant and engaged readership.

In this article, we’ll show you how to easily highlight the author’s comments in WordPress to boost engagement.

Why Highlight Author’s Comments in WordPress?

Comments are a great way to build user engagement on your website. If you want to get more comments on your articles, then you can encourage that by actively participating in the discussions.

For a new WordPress blog, you can easily reply to comments and take part in discussions with your readers. If you run a multi-author blog, then you can encourage authors to help with the comment moderation as well.

However, most WordPress themes don’t distinguish between comments, and they are listed using the same style.

A casual reader may scroll through the comments, not realizing the additional content contributed by the author in the discussion.

Highlighting author’s comments helps you remedy that and makes the author’s comments stand out and be more noticeable.

The ultimate goal here is to encourage new users to join in the comments and ultimately subscribe to your newsletter or become a customer.

That being said, let’s take a look at how to easily highlight author comments in WordPress.

Highlighting Comment Author in WordPress

The easiest way to highlight comments by post author is by adding custom CSS to your WordPress theme. This allows you to easily add the code needed and see a live preview of how it would look on your website without saving it.

First, you need to visit Appearance » Customize in WordPress admin area. This will launch the WordPress theme customizer interface. You’ll notice a bunch of options in a column on your left and a live preview of your website.

From here, you need to click on the ‘Additional CSS’ tab. This will open a text area where you’ll be adding the custom CSS.

However, you would want to see how the custom CSS will look when applied. To do that, you need to navigate to a blog post that contains comments by a post author.

Scroll down to the comments section and then add the following custom CSS in the Custom CSS box on the left.

.bypostauthor { 
background-color: #e7f8fb;
}

You’ll immediately notice the author comment change matching the custom CSS you entered.

So how does this all work?

You see, WordPress adds some default CSS classes to different areas of your website. These CSS classes are there regardless of which WordPress theme you are using.

In this sample code, we have used the .bypostauthor CSS class, which is added to all comments added by a post author.

Let’s add some more CSS styles to make it even more prominent. Here is a sample code that adds a small ‘Author’ label to the comments by the post author and a border around the author’s avatar image.

.bypostauthor:before { 
content:"Author";
float:right;
background-color:#FF1100;
padding:5px;
font-size:small;
font-weight:bold;
color:#FFFFFF;
}
.bypostauthor .avatar {
border:1px dotted #FF1100;
}

This is how it looked on our test website.

Highlighting Comments by User Role in WordPress

Now, many WordPress blogs have team members responsible for answering comments. Popular websites may have post author, administrator, and moderators all answering comments to boost user engagement.

How do you highlight a comment added by a staff member that is not the actual author of the post?

There is an easy hack to achieve that. However, it requires you to add custom code to your WordPress website. If you haven’t done this before, then see our article on how to paste snippets from the web into WordPress.

First, you need to add the following code to your theme’s functions.php file or in a code snippets plugin:

if ( ! class_exists( 'WPB_Comment_Author_Role_Label' ) ) :
class WPB_Comment_Author_Role_Label {
public function __construct() {
add_filter( 'get_comment_author', array( $this, 'wpb_get_comment_author_role' ), 10, 3 );
add_filter( 'get_comment_author_link', array( $this, 'wpb_comment_author_role' ) );
}
  
// Get comment author role 
function wpb_get_comment_author_role($author, $comment_id, $comment) { 
$authoremail = get_comment_author_email( $comment); 
// Check if user is registered
if (email_exists($authoremail)) {
$commet_user_role = get_user_by( 'email', $authoremail );
$comment_user_role = $commet_user_role->roles[0];
// HTML output to add next to comment author name
$this->comment_user_role = ' <span class="comment-author-label comment-author-label-'.$comment_user_role.'">' . ucfirst($comment_user_role) . '</span>';
} else { 
$this->comment_user_role = '';
} 
return $author;
} 
  
// Display comment author                   
function wpb_comment_author_role($author) { 
return $author .= $this->comment_user_role; 
} 
}
new WPB_Comment_Author_Role_Label;
endif;

Instead of editing your theme’s functions.php file, we recommend adding this code with WPCode. This code snippets plugin makes it safe and easy to add custom code in WordPress.

To get started, you need to install and activate the free WPCode plugin. If you need help, see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Once the plugin is activated, go to head to Code Snippets » Add Snippet from your WordPress dashboard.

Then, hover your mouse over the ‘Add Your Custom Code (New Snippet)’ option and click the ‘Add Custom Snippet’ button.

Next, select ‘PHP Snippet’ as the code type from the options that appears on the screen.

Now, you can add a title for your snippet and paste the code from above into the ‘Code Preview’ box.

After that, simply toggle the switch from ‘Inactive’ to ‘Active’ and click the ‘Save Snippet’ button at the top of the page.

This code simply adds the user role label next to the comment author’s name. This is how it would look without any custom styling.

Let’s make it a little prettier by adding some custom CSS. Go to Appearance » Customize page and switch to the Additional CSS tab.

You can use the following CSS to style the user role label in the comments.

.comment-author-label {
    padding: 5px;
    font-size: 14px;
    border-radius: 3px;
}
  
.comment-author-label-editor {  
background-color:#efefef;
}
.comment-author-label-author {
background-color:#faeeee;
}
  
.comment-author-label-contributor {
background-color:#f0faee;   
}
.comment-author-label-subscriber {
background-color:#eef5fa;   
}
  
.comment-author-label-administrator { 
background-color:#fde9ff;
}

This is how it looked on our test site. Feel free to modify the code to match your theme’s colors and style.

For more details, you may want to read our article on how to add user role labels to WordPress comments.

We hope this article helped you learn how to highlight author comments in WordPress. You may also want to see our tutorial on how to highlight new posts for returning visitors in WordPress and our expert picks of the best author bio box plugins for WordPress.

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