How to Display Recent Comments with Gravatar in WordPress

WordPress comes with few default widgets and this is including a Recent Comments widget. As the name suggests, you can use this widget to display recent comments on your sidebar or any registered widget location. The default widget comes with very limited option from the panel - you can only set the widget title and set number of recent comments to be displayed.

Luckily, if you wish to display recent comments with Gravatar of the users, there’s a plugin called WP Recent Comments With Avatars. This plugin is completely free of charge and is available from WordPress.org plugin repo.

Here’s an example of how it looks like on Twenty Twelve theme:

The plugin does not add any additional option or widget, just plug and play. Instead, it will overwrite the default recent comments widget. It will pull the commentator’s Gravatar and display an excerpt of first 50 words. Also, there’s an arrow after each comment that linked to the original comment.

Depending on the theme you’re using, some themes might need some CSS adjustment. This can easily be done by using a tool like Firebug (if you use Firefox) and Chrome Developer Tools.