can I remove the comment section on wordpress posts?

[mugatea]

hey, working on making my site faster, 99% of my posts have no comments, some of the ones that do have hundreds and one has 1000. The one with a thousand comments, that post is 10% post and 90% comment section. Can I just remove the comment section and any ability to comment altogether without harming my seo?

 

[Ally Maxwell]

How about the 'disable comments' plug in ?

 

[Ozzy]

I don't know if removing comments will effect your SEO, but I'd imagine not greatly.
If you are asking how to remove comments though, that's generally quite easy. On my Wordpress installation it's a tick box in the Discussion option under Settings, and also when editing the Post. You may also find it as a custom option for your Theme.

 

[fisicx]

How about the 'disable comments' plug in ?

Don’t need a plugin to do this.

Use the ‘quick edit’ option on each post to disable comments.

Or select all posts and use the ‘edit’ option above the list.

 

[mugatea]

thanks guys. Graham, if I do that, it wont harm my better ranking posts will it? comments, especially if you have hundreds destroy loading time

Oh that just disables them, I can actually remove them quite easy, is that ok from a seo point of view and just have posts without comments?

*Oh I've just went and done it and its better. Better as posts load a lot quicker and 99% of posts that had no comments look better without a form

 

[UKSBD]

Content in comments is little different to content in the post.

If there are specific phrases in the comments that are not in the post, removing the comments can effect your rankings.

If it's your popular post I doubt removing the comments would be as detrimental as if it was just a short post, you may lose some longtail traffic though

 

[mugatea]

well I subbmitted that big post to Google console and today it tanked. On serprobot it went from 3 to 88 but it wasnt the post at 88 it was my homepage. so I've put the comments back up. wonder if it was just a dance and it would settle down or if google valued the comments more than the post or maybe the change was so big they saw it as a new post.

 

[mugatea]

Ha! Found out that gravatar images on 1000 comments screwed up the post loading speed. I was using MonsterID images for commenters with no gravatar image, but even MonsterID images are downloaded from gravatar, thats 1000 images that had to be requested just for the comment section. Turned off gravatars and post page speed is now 3 seconds faster and requests went from 400 down to 39.

 

[UKSBD]

It doesn't look as though Google sees any of your comments before 4th October

Did you previously have it set to only show so many comments?

 

[mugatea]

I had it set to break after so many comments

 

[UKSBD]

check the cached snapshot of the page

copy some text from the last comment (made on October 4th) and search for it in quotation marks. and you will see Google sees it.

Then do the same for the next comment down (made on 10th August) and you will see Google doesn't see that.

That basically tells you that you can set it back to only show a few comments without the fear of losing rankings

 

[mugatea]

well its jumped up to number 2 at the mo, so I will leave it for now, but I think removing avatars has worked out quite well

 

[505]

According to what I have seen in my work, the comments show the interest of users in the respective publication. This means a higher ranking of the publication itself in Google Search. So, I would not remove the comments. You did the right thing with the avatars, the unnecessary load, better without pictures. The problem is not only in the images it generates, but also the CSS styles for them

 

[StevePoster]

Quality comments in your wordpress posts still counts to build your reputation. However it will need strict moderation to filter all the comments in your pages.

 

[Jyothi Tulasi]

Comments are always helpful. Better to make the comment section nofollow and just keep the entire section. It may even depend on the type of service you provide.

 

[richwrite]

Some bloggers have strong opinions and believe that comments are a crucial feature of a blog. The majority of people are pragmatic about it and believe that comments are helpful. However, removing the comments /comment section can have both positive and negative effects on your blogs. Removing the comment section results in no spam comments on your blog post, the size of the page will be smaller, and your web page’s performance will also increase.