Do you want to learn how to paginate comments in WordPress?
If your site gets lots of comments, then it’s a sign users are engaged with your content. However, showing all these comments on a single page can slow your WordPress website down.
In this article, we will show you how to speed up your post loading times by paginating comments in WordPress.
Why You Should Paginate Comments in WordPress
Have you noticed that blog posts with lots of comments take longer to load?
Showing a large number of comments on a single page puts more pressure on your WordPress hosting server, which may slow down your website.
Posts with lots of comments may even exhaust the server’s memory and cause your visitors to see the white screen of death.
Search engines like Google use WordPress speed and performance as ranking factors, so a large number of comments is also bad news for your WordPress SEO.
Additionally, comments add a lot of content to your posts but don’t always include your target keyword. This will affect your keyword-to-content ratio, which can stop search engines from indexing your post for the right keywords.
With that in mind, let’s see how you can split comments across multiple pages by paginating comments in WordPress.
Paginating WordPress Comments in Two Steps
The first thing you need to do is log in to your WordPress admin area and go to the Settings » Discussions page.
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 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.’
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 by splitting a long post into multiple pages.
Just be aware that comment pagination can negatively impact your SEO if it’s not used correctly. This happens when WordPress creates URLs for each new page of comments, as search engines see this as spammy duplicate content.
The good news is that you can easily fix this problem using the AIOSEO plugin. It’s the best WordPress SEO plugin and automatically adds ‘comment-page’ followed by a number to each page of comments. This way, you won’t get hit with SEO penalties.
You can easily change the URLs that AIOSEO creates for your comment pages in the plugin’s settings. For help getting started with this powerful SEO tool, please see our guide on how to set up All in One SEO for WordPress correctly.
We hope that this tutorial helped you paginate comments in WordPress. You might also want to see our guide on how to combat comment spam in WordPress or see our top picks for the must-have WordPress plugins to grow your website.
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Duncan Shaw says
Hey, do you know if you can have comments paginate according to the date of the comments?
Eg. Comments on page 3 for 28/07, Comments on page 2 for 29/07, Comments on page 1 for 30/07
WPBeginner Support says
We do not have a recommended method at the moment for that and if you wanted users to have conversations it would normally be best not to separate comments by date.
Admin
Thien Nhan says
Hi,
I did follow these steps to split 20 comments per pages but the comment did not break into pages. It still showed all 30 comments in one page.
Is there any idea why?
Thank you.
WPBeginner Support says
You would want to start by clearing your cache and if it’s not a caching issue you would likely need to check with your theme to ensure the theme you’re using does not try to override that setting.
Admin
brian says
As far as I read and I understand paginate comments will create duplicate content.. So it’s not recommended at all to paginate comments.
WPBeginner Support says
Most SEO plugins set up a canonical link on the paginated comment pages to point to the correct post for search engines.
Admin
Sonu says
How can we show the new comment to user (which he just added) if we are using W3 total cache?
The page is cached for 3 hours using browser Cache.
Do you know of a plugin that probably uses wordpress JSON api to communicate and add comments to wp database.
WPBeginner Support says
For the method the plugins use, you would want to reach out to the specific plugin. You may want to take a look at WP Rocket for what it sounds like you’re looking for.
Admin
Adnan Sami says
What about noindex/nofollow comment-page? how to noindex comment-page ?
HH says
It does not work at all, why?
Nick Corcodilos says
This setting blew up my comments entirely once the number of comments got large — like over 100. It did not paginate — instead, it STOPPED DISPLAYING the first 100 comments altogether, with no option for the user to go to the page to view older comments. Suddenly, where I had 157 comments on a post (and it SAID 157 Comments up at the top), only 27 were showing. I turned this setting OFF altogether and all my comments came back.
I’m using WordPress 4.4.2. This is a serious bug.
TJ says
One negative of WordPress split page comments is what happens when the comments-per-page tipping point is reached? The default, canonical page will end up showing just one comment.
For instance, let’s say it’s set to show 10 comments per page and there are 21 comments. Well, the default, canonical page that 99.9% of folks visit will only show the 21st comment, while the previous page will hold the other 20. This can be confusing and looks bad. It would be preferable for the primary page to always show the maximum number of comments per page, but WordPress doesn’t make this possible without putting together a complicated class that extends the Walker_Comment class.
malcolm says
I have this exact same problem and it’s very frustrating. Like you say, it makes the comments look ridiculous if a post says at the top it has 103 comments, but then the reader scrolls down and sees there are just 3.
Does anyone know a way around this?