How to Remove URL / Website Field from WordPress Comment Form?

Engagement is extremely important for any website. In order to set up proper engagement, a direct line of communication should be fostered with care. One way for it is a comment form.

WordPress comes with a built-in comment system that allows for community interaction around your content. Anyone with a valid Name and Email can leave a comment without verifying their identity.

WordPress comment form comes with three fields (name, email, and website or URL). When displaying the comments, WordPress automatically hyperlinks the name of the commenter with the website URL they provided.

It is true that WordPress websites attract a lot of spammers as most of them know how easy it is to build backlinks off from them. Most bloggers do not know how to control spam and they do not have the time to moderate each comment.

Some blackhat SEO guys misuse it and spam your site. And you may be finding ways to stop spam on your website. One of the ways includes removing the URL/Website field from comment form is always beneficial.

If you are a constant target of comment link spam and you have very little time to moderate the comments, then removing the website field entirely will seriously discourage the link spammers.

In this guide, I will tell you two easy ways to remove the URL/website field from the WordPress website.

1. Using comment.php:

• Go to your theme’s comments.php file.
• Just remove ‘url’ => field from the code.

Here is the sample code that you have to remove:

$url = '<p class="comment-form-url">' .
'<input id="url" name="url" type="text" value="' . esc_attr( $commenter['comment_author_url'] ) . '" size="30" tabindex="3" />' .
'<label for="url">' . __( 'Website', 'genesis' ) . '</label>' .
'</p>';

Note: Every theme has a different code. So make sure you are removing it accordingly. The above code snippet is from the Genesis framework.

2. Using Function.php:

Add the below code to theme’s functions.php file.

// Remove URL/Website field in Comment form
add_filter('comment_form_default_fields','infophilic_remove_comment_url');
  function infophilic_remove_comment_url($fields) { 
    unset($fields['url']);
  return $fields;
}

The code above creates a function called website_remove() and removes (or unsets) the URL field.

Using the Hook add_filter(), we pass the argument to default WordPress function comment_form_default_fields that contain fields of the comment form.

Conclusion:

I hope you find this article useful, and hopefully, this will decrease spam comments on your site. You might also want to read another guide on ‘How to Remove Comment Author URL in WordPress‘.

How do you deal with manually submitted spam comments on your site? Share your opinions in the comment section below.