WordPress is a solid platform offering complete features needed for a blog. However, you may not need all features for your site and it is essential to disable unnecessary features that you do not use. Showing comment author link in the published comment is one of the annoying features in WordPress that drives lot of spam. Disabling this will help to avoid spams and reduce server bandwidth. In this article, we will explain how you can do that.
Related: Top 5 author box plugins for WordPress
Default WordPress Behavior
By default, WordPress comment form contains the following fields.
- Name – comment author name (mandatory)
- Email – comment author email address (mandatory)
- Website – comment author link (optional)
- Comment message – content for the comment (mandatory)
- Submit button
There are some plugins add additional fields to comment form. For example, in the above screenshot you can see two notify checkboxes which are added by Jetpack plugin. In addition, you can show or hide the author cookie option from “Settings > Discussion” section.
The website field is where commenter can leave the URL. Unfortunately, 99% of the comments you receive will contain this field as the intention of commenting is to simply get backlink. Though WordPress adds user generated content tag to the comment links (using rel=ugc attribute), many commenters use this field for spamming your site.
Why You Should Remove Comment Author Link?
WordPress also offers an option to hold the comments if it contains one or more hyperlinks. You can enable this setting from “Settings > Discussion” section of your admin dashboard. However, there are no options to disable the website link field in the comment form. What you can do is to manually remove the links when approving comments under “Comments” section. This is possible if you hold the comments for moderation, otherwise comments will be auto approved and the junk links will be shown in your site.
You have to remove or disable the website URL field in the comment form due to the following reasons:
- Pornography and other bad hyperlinks will affect your site’s reputation.
- You may get problems in Google ranking due to the bad links on your site.
- Legitimate users clicking on the comment link may get annoyed when it takes to not safe for work websites.
- You need to spend plenty of time in cleaning up the spam comments.
- Every time when a user submits comment, WordPress runs the comments.php file and update the data in comments meta table. You can save server bandwidth by disabling spam comments with URL.
How to Remove Comment Author Link in WordPress Comments?
Now that you know how comment author links can harm your site. therefore, we strongly recommend you to remove the filed from the comment. This will completely stop spam comments and only legitimate users will leave comments on your site.
- Purchase Perfmatters plugin which will cost $24.95. You can also get 10% discount to get this complete optimization plugin.
- Install and activate the license of the plugin to get updates.
- Navigate to “Settings > Perfmatters” section and you will see many tabs.
- Under “Options” tab, click on “General” option and scroll down a bit.
- Find “Remove Comment URLs” and enable that option.
- Scroll to the bottom and click “Save Changes” button to save your settings.
Testing the Comment Form
After saving your changes, the plugin will simply remove the “Website” field from the comment form. Now the form will look like below on your site.
This is a professional way to remove comment author link in WordPress comment form.