Replies counting as comments..

There’s no built-in way that I can find, but it’s easy enough to do yourself witha little bit of custom code (note.. this is completely untested):

$post_id = 5; // Make this whatever you need to for your own post ID.

global $wpdb;

$query = "SELECT
    COUNT(comment_ID)
    FROM ".$wpdb->comments."
    WHERE comment_parent = 0
        AND comment_post_ID = ".$post_id.";";

$num_comments = $wpdb->get_var ($query);

That will get the top-level comment count for a single post. If you want to get the count for all posts you can remove the last line of the query.

Where do I put the code snippet ?

It depends on where you want the comment count to appear. In a shortcode would make sense if you want to display it in a page’s content. Here’s an example that uses the code provided above. Place this in your functions.php file or use the Code Snippets plugin.

add_shortcode('comment_count', 'wpsf_comment_count_shortcode');
function wpsf_comment_count_shortcode()
{
  global $wpdb;
  $query = "SELECT
    COUNT(comment_ID)
    FROM " . $wpdb->comments . "
    WHERE comment_parent = 0";

  return $wpdb->get_var($query);
}

Then, you would insert the shortcode in the editor like this: “We have [comment_count] answers on the site.”

Thank you so much !