On this page I am going to show you how to remove the website field from comment forms in WordPress using the Advanced Comment Form plugin.

Dashboard
Comments > Comment Form
Option
remove url field

How it looks like

Compared Comment Form without Website Field

Comment Form with and without the website field.

How to remove the url field

Visit the Option Page under Comments > Comment Form

There are currently two options you can use. Both are explained below.

Remove website field options

Remove website field with WordPress standards

Choose the first option to remove the website field in case your theme uses WordPress standards. Don’t worry, you don’t need to know what this means. Simply check the option and see if the field is now missing in your comment forms. If this is not working, try the next method or see the issue section below.

Remove the website field with CSS

If the WordPress comment form is not implemented using standard methods or when your website was developed with WordPress before version 3.0.0, chances are, the first method is not working. In this case – and only than – try the second method. It simply hides the website field for visitors. The field is still visible for (spam) bots and also tech-savvy visitors can display and use it. It might also leave some blank space.

In case this method doesn’t work and you need this urgendly you can contact me for a customization job.

Potential issues / other solutions

Missing files and function

Since WordPress 3.0.0 (released June 17, 2010) the comment form files and functions changed a lot. If your website is older or uses older themes chances are they are missing the file comments.php or the function comment_form(). In this case, using the remove-website-field option in Advanced Comment Form might not work.

If you can write code or have a theme developer by hand, you can have a look at this tutorial where I wrote about the code to remove the website field in comment forms.

Marketing aspects

The most common reason to remove the website field from your comment form is to demotivate people commenting only to get a backlink. This works only, if links are still set manually, but doesn’t stop spam bots to automatically comment on your blog posts.

Removing the field for the url in WordPress comment forms also doen’t remove the urls that are already set in previous comments. Those are still being displayed. I personally believe this is ok, if their comments are of value.

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