Just a blog: WordPress Optimization Tip: Close Comment on Older Posts

Friday, 17 February 2012

WordPress Optimization Tip: Close Comment on Older Posts - DailyBlogTips

WordPress Optimization Tip: Close Comment on Older Posts

Posted: 17 Feb 2012 01:47 AM PST

If your site is responding quickly and rarely suffers downtimes then I wouldn’t recommend you to turn comments off on older posts, as this removes some of the visitor interaction and also makes your older posts more static.

That being said if your site is feeling sluggish lately closing comments on older posts could help, and here is why: even if you don’t notice it, every day your blog receives dozens, hundreds, and sometimes even thousands of comments per day. How come you don’t notice them? It’s because they are spam comments, and AdSense (or whatever anti-spam plugin you use) is catching those for you.

Needless to say that processing, identifying and filtering all those spam comments requires some processing power, and that is why turning comments off on older posts can actually make your server runs a bit faster.

In order to close comments you just need to go to Settings->Discussion inside your dashboard. I opted to close comments on posts older than 7 days, but that is because I was having big spam problems. If your case is not as severe then 30 or even 60 days would be fine too.

Finally, make sure to check how your theme will be displayed with closed comments, as sometimes the designer hadn’t planned for this, and it might break your post layout (though fixing it should be a matter of closing a <div> tag or two).