In this tutorial, we are going to show you how to remove the Website URL Field which appears by default in the WordPress comment form.
As you might be aware, spam comments are a big issue for any WordPress Blog. The biggest reason you get spam comments as well is for people to get a backlink to their website using the Website URL field that appears in the comment form by default.
Since most of the spam is generated by automated bots, you can combat this with free tools and plugins. The trickiest part is to discourage spam comments submitted by real people. These are generally comments submitted by actual users are tend to either be off-topic, irrelevant, but also add no value to the discussion of the post. A good tool for this is Akismet along with removing the URL field from the comment form.
We are going to show you two ways to remove the Website URL Field; first one being with custom code and the second with the use of a plugin.
How to Manually Remove the Website URL Field From WordPress Comment Form
We always supply the manual removal first, as if you can get away without adding additional plugins to your website, it’s always better. What you need to do is actually quite simple; simply add the below code to your functions.php file and jobs a good’n.
add_filter('comment_form_default_fields', 'unset_url_field');
function unset_url_field($fields){
if(isset($fields['url']))
unset($fields['url']);
return $fields;
}
What this does is simply removes the Website URL field from your WordPress comment form.
How to Remove the Website URL Field From WordPress Comment Form With A Plugin
If you want to go ahead with the plugin method, again, this is very simple. All you need to do is install and activate the Comment Link Remove and Other Comment Tools plugin
First, you need to install and activate the Comment Link Remove and Comment Tools plugin. For detailed instructions, please follow our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Once activated, you will see a new menu item called QC CLR Settings in the left sidebar of your WordPress Dashboard. Clicking on this will take you to the plugins settings page as shown below:
The main option to select is the “Remove WEBSITE Field from Comment Form” option, then simply scroll down and click “Save Changes”.
Now to check, log out of WordPress and view any of your posts and you will see the field is now removed.
Do note, the comments that are already approved will still have their author names linked to their website URL.
To remove them, you need to go back to the settings page of this plugin and check the box next to the “Remove hyperlink from comment AUTHOR Bio” option.
Once you save the changes, the links from the existing comments will be removed as well.
Conclusion
We hope this tutorial has helped you in removing the website URL field from the WordPress comment form.
In relation to spam, you might also want to check out the following blog post:
How to stop spam emails coming from WordPress’ Contact Form 7
If this has helped, feel free to leave a comment below!