Thread: Speed up Wordpress by removing comment option

I'm trying to speed up Wordpress, make it operate faster, and one of the steps that I've taken is to remove the 'comment' option on one of my blogs, so that no-one can comment on it.
I was considering doing this anyway, but what finally made me decide to go ahead and do it was a claim by someone that 99% of comments on blogs are 'comment spam'.
Would you remove the comment option on your blog?

If it's a true blog, I would allow comments (just be sure to screen comments for spam, use akismet etc or whatever), as one of the main points in blogging is getting the user's perspective. If however, the site is not a blog, only made with a blogging platform, by all means disable commenting.

I would not choose this option for my blog at least. I need some loyal visitors to my website and if I do not allow them to post their comments on my website, they would never come again.

I think it depends upon the site. I recently disabled comments on some of my low-volume sites because the only comments they generated were spam.

I've removed the comment option from quite a few sites. I tend to use wordpress as a pure content management system sometimes, that means not operating it as a blog. CoreLogo - logo and graphic design that’s running wordpress with all the comments disabled.


Its also a very good idea to remove comments from blogs which hardly get any comments. Theres nothing worse than seeing a blog with no comments on the posts. It could potentially drive people amway.

Yes, I agree with dtkguy, it will really depends on the kind of website you are running.. since basically wordpress is a CMS so you can use it as a blog engine or a plain website. Regarding comment features, if it's a blog I am always allowing my visitors to leave their comments of course I am using akismet to screen them and a few other plugins to back it up.

Cheers,

Originally Posted by budhi1976

Yes, I agree with dtkguy, it will really depends on the kind of website you are running.. since basically wordpress is a CMS so you can use it as a blog engine or a plain website. Regarding comment features, if it's a blog I am always allowing my visitors to leave their comments of course I am using akismet to screen them and a few other plugins to back it up.

Cheers,

+1
watch the pic,banners, etc you hosted in other web host that placed in your blog.
This infects to slow your blog as well

Comments are equally important for blogs as based on that one can know about suggestions,feedbacks,critics on his/her articles/reviews to improve his/her blog. You can always use akismet or some other plugins to get rid of SPAM comments.

DON.

Wow.. I can see many favoring the comment option removal. I strongly disagree with this. If the site is of low-value as Will said, it's all okay to disable the option. Else a well-running blog should not disable comments. Why? I have personally tested and found out my posts ranking higher where I got more comments and reads. Of course they should not be spam. And one can always use akismet to filter filthy stuff.

Google gives more weight to blogs or posts that have genuine comments. First, it increases the relevant content of that page. Second, even if it is no-follow, outlinking works very well.

I have got good PR on posts/pages where I got more comments and discussions. One can even optimize the comment section nicely in order to provoke better discussions.

If your blog is not jus "another" general blog for contextual links, you should not close the comments.

This post is nice to have an idea

How to get more Blog comments and increase search engine rankings

It was my opinion. I'm open to discussions always though.

I do have comments disabled on 9 of my 10 blogs, but that is because I am using WordPress primarily as a CMS platform.

However, the one site where I do have comments enabled gets far more traffic than the other sites and I have never done anything special to promote any of the blogs. I think the comments encourage repeat visits, plus it adds content, which the spiders love.

I am in the process of converting my main business site to WordPress and I do plan to enable comments on the articles in the site.

I do find that 95+% of the comments are spam, especially as the site becomes popular, but Akismet filters out most and I report the rest as spam. When you find spam that Akismet is not catching, do not delete it. Click the spam link to report it as spam.