Table of Contents
Benefits from Allowing Blog Comments
Drawbacks from Allowing Blog Comments
Should You Allow Comments on Your WordPress Blog?
Steps for Managing Comments
How to Disable Comments on Your WordPress Website
From time to time, our web design clients have been asked whether comments should be disabled within their WordPress blog. So, I felt it would be a good idea to discuss this very topic in today’s article.
Benefits from Allowing Blog Comments
Engagement
User comments within your blog posts can help to improve content length and keyword variety for that article, and serve as an indicator to Google of greater user engagement. As such, this can enhance organic search rankings. Blog comments can also increase a blog’s authority and credibility.
Loyalty
When it comes to your online presence, nothing beats user engagement. As such, comments let you, as the author, reply to visitors and this can build trust and grow a community, turning a one-time visitor into a loyal reader. Blogs that allow commenting can be a real hot bed of engagement, and as a result, lead to emails and shares. Loyal readers may subscribe and spread the word and can become your biggest promoters.
Idea Cultivation
Comments can be a great way to foster new ideas. Readers ask questions to which you can respond, which not only leads to greater engagement, but becomes a new topic to write about. For examples, say someone asks about “the best plugins to speed up your WordPress website.” Voilà…your next blog article “5 Plugins to Speed Up Your WordPress Website” is born.
Drawbacks from Allowing Blog Comments
Allowing comments may sound like a great idea, but moderating them can become a real pain in the neck.
Spam Risks
When your blog posts are open to comments, a lot of comment spam can start flooding in, particularly from bots. It is an unfortunate reality that WordPress blogs get hit with a voluminous number of fake, spammy comments daily. As such, the time spent on moderating your blog’s comments can be seemingly endless. Of course, you can implement anti-spam plugins such as Akismet, but they do not stop all comment spam.
Security Risks
Did you know that allowing readers to post comments can make your WordPress website more vulnerable to hackers? That is because hackers can inject code into the comment form, which may enable them to steal data.
SEO Risks
If you let too much comment spam accumulate, it can cause your website’s database to get bloated, which can slow down your web page load times. This can hurt your rankings with Google.
Brand Risks
Trolls love to troll. One rude comment can lead to more and an attack on you or other readers. Deleting them looks weak, ignoring them lets the bad behavior spread. It not only hurts the mental health of you and your legitimate readers, it can also damage your brand as readers see the negativity and leave, increasing your bounce rate.
Should You Allow Comments on Your WordPress Blog?
It depends as everyone’s cost/benefits analysis may be different.
Assess Your Current Traffic
If you have a low traffic website, comments may stay quiet and useful, whereas if you have a high traffic website, it may much more likely to attract a lot of comment spam.
Evaluate Your Resources for Comment Moderation
Do have lots of time to moderate comments on a daily basis? If not, comments are going to pile up. As mentioned earlier, you could also install a plugin such as Akismet to help cut down on the amount of comment spam.
Consider the SEO Implications
Even though comments are user generated content (UGC) that can help SEO efforts, it is arguably more important to create quality blog posts that build trust. Google cares more about E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness) than comment volume.
Steps for Managing Comments
- Limit comment posting to logged-in users only. Hold newbies’ comments for approval.
- Throttle comment posts by limiting to one comment posted per hour, per IP.
- Utilize CAPTCHA.
- Auto-delete links in comments using a plugin such as “Comment Link Remove and Other Comment Tools” by QuantumCloud.
How to Disable Comments on Your WordPress Website
To disable comments for new posts, do the following:
- Log into your WordPress dashboard.
- Go to “Settings”, then click on “Discussion”.
- Uncheck “Allow people to submit comments.”
Alternatively, you can install and activate the “Disable Comments RB” plugin by rbplugins to globally turn off comments for all posts. Be sure to click on “Settings” after activating this plugin and select “Disable all comments” then click on the “Save Changes” button.
If you would like to learn more about whether you should disable comments on your WordPress website, contact our web design team at Prominent Web Design.
EMAIL US