There are different situations in which we do not want to have all the WordPress comments on the same page. Not only will the pages become really long and conversations would be harder to follow but the posts that are really popular would end up causing you more harm than good.
Why Should I Paginate WordPress Comments?
1. Increased Page Load Speed
The posts that have the most comments are almost always the ones that are the most popular. Because of this you want them to load really fast. When you have a lot of comments it is inevitable that page load speed decreases. This lowers your blogging success.
2. Better Overall Design
When you have a post with, let’s say 500 words and hundreds of comments, the design of your blog will be affected. A lot of blog owners include important links in the footer section. Fewer people will see and click those links.
3. More People Will Read The Comments
You want blog visitors to react, comment and basically get involved. When there are too many comments on one page, it is a guarantee that fewer people will comment when compared to how many would since it would be unattractive to scroll through the comments. This leads to a missed opportunity.
4. No White Screen Of Death
There are many WordPress users that reported they get this when there are posts with many comments. It actually appears because memory is exhausted. Through pagination you can avoid this. If the screen is still there, read more on how to solve the White Screen Of Death here.
How To Paginate Comments Without Plugins
There are some plugins that will do this for you. We even have some that will organize everything in a highly attractive manner and give many opportunities for visitors to use social profiles in order to comment. Plugins are usually recommended but there are cases in which you might not want to add a comments plugin in WordPress since you are happy with what you have right now.
There are not many blog owners that know this. WordPress actually comes with such a feature and you can activate it. All that you have to do is go to Settings > Discussions. You will see a feature called “Break comments into pages with”. The default setting is 50 but you can choose whatever amount you want based on how many comments you usually have on the most popular posts.
Based on the styling of the theme used, numeric pagination will appear or you get to see Previous/Next links in the comments section. You automatically gained all the benefits above in just under one minute.
You can play around with the settings there so that you get the best experience possible. Choose if you want the newest comments to be seen first or the old ones. The recommended setting is the one that is already selected but you may want to customize it. This part is purely subjective. However, if you see that the number of comments on your blog starts to drop, it is better to just activate pagination and leave the other settings as they were.
