Are you looking to paginate comments in WordPress?
WordPress posts and pages with lots of comments load slower. But you do not want to delete those comments as those comments mean the community is engaging with your content. The most commented post means the most popular post.
But having a slow loading page will eventually hurt the website’s SEO.
In this article, we will learn to load comments with pagination in WordPress.
What is Pagination?
Pagination means breaking the long content into multiple pieces and then adding the number in sequential order.
In WordPress, you can paginate a blog post and pages. You might have seen pagination under the blog archive pages of many websites.
Similarly, you can load comments with pagination in WordPress.
How to Load Comments with Pagination in WordPress?
Follow the steps to load comments with pagination in WordPress:
Step 1: Log in to WordPress Admin Dashboard
Step 2: Navigate to Settings » Discussions page
Step 3: Find the ‘Break comments into pages’ option under comment settings
Step 4: Enter the number of comments you want on each page
Step 5: Set how you want to display the comments
- Display the last page or the first page of the first by default?
- Older comment first or the latest communes first by default?
Step 6: Click on ‘Save Changes to save the changes.
You will see numeric pagination or ‘Previous / Next’ comment links depending on your theme.
That’s it. You have paginated the comments on WordPress.
Why Comment Pagination?
Just because you can do it does not mean you should do it. But paginating the comment section is recommended.
If you do not get 100s of comments on your post, it is OK to leave it as it is. But if you are getting comments in hundreds, it could increase the page weight. The heavy page would be difficult to lift quickly, and each second counts while ranking for competitive keywords.
Breaking the comments into several pages reduces the weight and increases page speed.
SEO Effects of Comment Pagination
The SEO community is divided regarding the SEO effects of comment pagination. There is no concrete study to prove or disprove anything.
As the page speed increases, it will positively affect the browsing experience and ranking. But the extra effort users must take to click the button to read the following comment is a poor browsing experience.
And then there is comment content. Suppose the comment content is relevant to the topic (which probably it is), then it could improve the search intent, increasing the users dwelling time on the page – which means better rankings. But if there is a discussion without mentioning the keyword, it could reduce the keyword content ratio – which is a feeble on-page SEO tactic. Still, without keywords, search engines could not identify the page’s intention.
On the other hand, if the keywords are included with some tactics, one has to maintain the comment quality. Many factors are involved in saying anything about the SEO effects of comment pagination. But I would love to hear your opinion in the comments section.
Wrap Up
A website should load fast for a better browsing experience, search engine traffic, and conversion rate. You should take every step to ensure the website is loading at its full potential.
Minimizing the CSS and HTML, optimizing the images, enabling the browser caching, and disabling image hotlinking would not work if the website host is not powerful enough.
Recently ServerGuy increased the JadeBlue speed and performance by two times. Check out our WordPress hosting if you want the same result for your WordPress website.
I hope this article helped in paginating the comment in WordPress. If you encounter any errors, please leave them in the comment section.
