Wordpress Comments Pagination

[jeremycabral]

Hi Mozzers

What is your view on the following. Should you

1. Paginate comments to increase page speed? If yes, at what # of comments would you begin pagination? (with the objective being decreasing page load times)
2. Apply rel="canonical" back to the main article URL? eg: url/comment-page-1 => url
3. noindex the comment pages?
4. create a "View all" comments page?

Thanks in advance for your help!
J

[Toddfoster]

If you are hitting the 200-300 comments/page mark it might be better to get into pagination from a sheer UX perspective - depending on their dedication to the content matter, it is unlikely that the average user is going to want to sift through so many comments after reading your content.

I don't know what audience you are targeting, but it seems to me that 25-50 would be sufficient to capture the essence of most commenting sections regardless of topic and would also help with loading times.

Ray makes a great point about the canonical tag and rel tags though - as with everything, your strategy has to account for your specific situation and marketing approach.

[jeremycabral]

Thanks for the response Ray-pp! Would you say the same if the page had over 1,000 comments? The average is around ~200-300 comments per page

[Ray-pp]

I say to put all those comments on a single page. If I'm searching through comments, I hate skipping through multiple pages.

If comments are increasing your page load speed, then pagination may be the solution, but I would try to solve the performance bottleneck first. You would want a proper canonical tag and use prev/next rel tags.