How to Paginate Comments in WordPress?Have you ever noticed that posts with lots of comments load slower than other posts? That is because of loading so many comments on posts increase the server response time which increase loading time of your website. Having so many comments is a good thing if its relevant because it means users are interacting with your content. The most commented posts on your website are usually your most popular post.
However if a high number of comments are slowing down your site, then it may hurts your SEO ranking. That’s where pagination of WordPress comments comes handy. In this post we will show you how you can paginate comments in WordPress to speed up your load time. The amazing thing is that it comes with WordPress as default feature and this is very easy.
Why you should paginate comments in WordPress:
Comment pagination helps improving website speed which is an essential factor of your SEO ranking. Many users have reported that sometimes post with lots of comments cause their readers to see white screen of death because of server’s memory exhausted. Even when it doesn’t show white screen of death; post with lots of comments will load very slowly.
Pagination of comments reduces server load for your most commented posts by splitting comment into various pages.
Another main reason to paginate WordPress comments is to maintain keyword density of articles. Comments add lots of content to your posts, page and they may not always include keywords in sufficient amount.
When keyword to content ratio decreases, search engine fails to index post with the right keywords.
If comment pagination is not used correctly it may also have negative impact. . WordPress generates urls for each new page of comments. Search engine may consider this as duplicate content. This issue can be easily fixed by Yoast SEO plugin which points search engine to canonical url of website.
Let’s have a look on how to easily paginate comments in WordPress.
Steps to Paginate Comments in WordPress:-
Initial thing you need to do is login WordPress admin dashboard and navigate to settings>> Discussions page.
Next search for “break comments into pages” option. Here you get the option of enter number of comments you want on each page. Click on save changes to store your settings. Now you can visit popular post of your site that has lots of comments and you will notice pagination below comments.
Depends on theme style you will see numeric or previous/next comment links. Just link comments you can also paginate posts by splitting a long post into multiple pages.