Active comment sections are great for engagement, but they can slow down your WordPress website significantly.We’ve managed posts with dozens of comments, and we’ve learned that pagination is essential for maintaining both performance and user experience.
When popular posts attract hundreds of comments, loading them all at once can create frustrating delays for your visitors.Thankfully, WordPress offers built-in tools to break up your comments into easily digestible pages that load quickly.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to add WordPress pagination to your comments to improve your site’s speed.
Why Should You Add Pagination for Comments in WordPress?
Have you noticed that blog posts with lots of comments take longer to load? That’s because your WordPress hosting server needs to process and display every single comment before showing the page to visitors.
When you add pagination to comments, your server only needs to load a small portion of comments at a time – maybe 10 or 20 instead of hundreds.This significantly reduces the server load and improves WordPress speed and performance.
This is why we paginate comments here on WPBeginner, especially on our popular tutorials that receive hundreds of comments.
Think of it like serving dinner to guests.It’s much easier to bring out 10 plates at a time than trying to carry 100 plates at once.The same principle applies to your WordPress comments.
Search engines like Google use Core Web Vitals (page speed) as a ranking factor, so faster-loading pages can help your WordPress SEO.By implementing comment pagination, you’re not just improving user experience – you’re also potentially boosting your search rankings.
With that in mind, let’s see how you to enable WordPress pagination with numbers for your comment section.
How to Add Pagination to Your WordPress Comments
The first thing you need to do is log in to your WordPress admin area and go to the Settings » Discussions page.
This is where you can customize your WordPress comment settings.
For example, you can change the default gravatar image and manage comment notification emails.
Here, find ‘Break comments into pages’ and check the box next to it.
You can now type in the number of comments you want to show on each page of your WordPress blog.
You can also change whether the oldest or newest comment page will be displayed first using the ‘first/last page displayed by default’ dropdown menu.
After that, you can change whether each page will show the oldest or newest comments first using the ‘Comments should be displayed with the….’ dropdown menu.
When you are happy with how the pagination is set up, just scroll to the bottom of the screen and click on ‘Save Changes.’
That’s it!
Now, if you visit a post that has lots of comments, you should see the pagination in action.
Just like comments, you can also paginate WordPress posts into several pages.You can learn more about this topic in our article on how to split WordPress posts into multiple pages.
How to Optimize Your WordPress Comment Pagination
Paginating your WordPress comments can help prevent performance issues in your website.That said, if they are not properly used, they can also create duplicate content.
This can make your site look spammy and confuse search engines.
The good news is that you can easily fix this problem using All in One SEO (AIOSEO).It’s the best WordPress SEO plugin that makes it easy to optimize your site for search engines, even if you have no SEO experience.
By default, AIOSEO will automatically add a page number to the SEO title of paginated content.
This will help search engines understand that the comment section has been spread across several pages and is not a duplicate of a single page.
To make sure search engines know which page is the most important, AIOSEO removes these page numbers from the URLs of your comment pages.
In other words, if you’ve split your comments into many pages, AIOSEO helps search engines know which one is the main page that people should see first.It does this by automatically turning on the ‘No Pagination for Canonical URLs’ setting.
To help you get started with AIOSEO, please see our guide on how to set up AIOSEO for WordPress.
Bonus Tip: Boost Comment Engagement With Thrive Themes
Paginating your comments can significantly improve website performance, but there’s more you can do to optimize your comment section for a better user experience.
Here’s where Thrive Comments, a powerful comment plugin by Thrive Themes, comes in handy.
This plugin has a feature to lazy load comments.This reduces the overall page load time, especially on pages with numerous comments, which supports the speed benefits of pagination.
The plugin also lets you remove the website URL field from the comment form, which is often used by spammers to insert malicious links.These links can not only harm your website but also mislead your commenters.
Additionally, Thrive Comments offers a comment featuring and burying functionality.
This allows you to curate your comment section so that it’s always productive and positive for all participants.
You can learn more about the plugin in our Thrive Themes review.
We hope that this tutorial helped learn how to add pagination to comments in WordPress.
You might also want to see our guide on how to combat comment spam in WordPress or our list of WordPress comment plugins to boost engagement.
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