How to Remove Comment Author URL in WordPress

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

By default, in WordPress, the comment form has three fields (name, email, and website or URL). WordPress automatically hyperlinks the commenter’s name with the website URL they provided when displaying the comments. This provides a huge incentive for blackhat SEO guys or newbie bloggers who don’t know any better way to SPAM your site.

This is why removing the URL field from the WordPress comment form is always beneficial. Doing this dramatically reduces the number of spam comments.

What about existing comment author URLs?

The answer is to remove all unwanted links, including no-follow links.

So,

How do you remove all existing comment author URLs?

No doubt, there are plugins available to perform this task. But I recommend doing it manually via phpMyAdmin. It’s easy and non-hectic.

• Go to your phpMyAdmin or any SQL administration tool that allows you to run queries to your database.
• Select your WordPress installation’s database.
• Go to the “SQL” tab.
• Enter any of the following queries.
• If your table prefix is not “wp_” change it accordingly.

To delete all comment URLs :

UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_author_url = '';

In the above query, I have set the URL value to empty. So, no worries about losing your comment.

To delete ALL comment URLs EXCEPT a specific link:

UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_author_url = '' WHERE NOT comment_author_url = 'https://www.infophilic.com/';

This query will avoid deleting the URL of those comments you made.

Once you have completed the activation, this plugin will remove the comment author URL from your WordPress theme’s comments template.

Conclusion:

I hope this guide helps you best in reducing spam on your site. You might like to read my other guide on ways to stop spam comments on WordPress Blog.

How do you deal with manually submitted spam comments on your site? What are your thoughts on removing the website URL field?