We’ve recently noticed some legitimate comments coming through to WordPress that links back to a service link to help with SEO back links to the user’s own site. While we do encourage engagement from our readers, we try to avoid these back linking. In this guide we will show you how to remove the website URL field from WordPress comments to prevent this from happening.
Remove The Website URL Field From The WordPress Comment Section
As mentioned above people enter comments with their own URL for SEO ranking. This is an easy way to get your website URL on a popular (high traffic site). We will show you how to remove the website URL field from your WordPress comment section to help reduce spam and get more ‘real’ engagement from your followers. PS – This won’t help with your SEO ranking.
Comment Tools Plugin
The Comment Link Remove and Other Comment Tools Plugin is a great plugin that not only removes the website URL field from the comment section but has a whole bunch of other tools revolving around improving your comment section of your website. (If you are not familiar with installing a WordPress plugin, follow our guide over here.)
Removing Website URL Comment Field Via PHP Code
I’m a fan of using short code snippets to remove a specific feature of the comment section or even to add a specific feature to WordPress without needing all the other features a plugin may offer. Add the following code to your WordPress website to remove the website URL field from your comments.
The code above will remove the website URL, but you may also remove the email or author from your WordPress comments section – but I don’t recommend in removing required fields from the WordPress comment section. Also please note that this is for the default WordPress comment feature and this may not work if you are using a plugin or third-party service for commenting.
Photo by Henry Dick on Unsplash
