Paginate Comments On WordPress
One of the best things I like about wordpress is comments system, it encourages your visitors to engage in healthy conversation with you. I have came across some super popular blogs where each posts receives hundreds of comments and the page gets really long to browse through all the comments, although long pages with huge number of comments is not a bad thing, but on some occasions it increases the page load time. Paginating comments can decrease the page load time to an extent and also decreases the page length which can be good in terms of SEO.
Paginating wordpress comments feature was built in to the software itself from the version 2.7, so you do not need to fight with the codes in your theme files to achieve it, instead just change the settings to your preference using following steps.
Get to Settings -> Discussions options
Browse through other comment settings
You can break the pages with number of comments you want to appear on each page, my blog is set to 10 comments per page, but you can set to whatever number you think will be the best for your site.
There is a
duplicate content issue problem
Paginating comments is a great idea to reduce the blog load time and reducing the page length, but there is a problem with duplicate content issue. When you paginate the comments area, each comment page will have the same post displayed at the top followed by the comments found on that page. This is a serious problem in terms of SEO. For example if your main post url is
comment pages will be
So that practically means except for the comments all these pages will display your main post.
So what is the solution?
Solution will be to use seo for paginated comments plugin
what does it do?
This plugin will make excerpt of the post on comments page leaving a ling to the main content page. This will be your solution to avoid the duplicate content issue and this plugin comes in quite handy to over come this problem.