Having many comments in our publications is a good thing because it means that your users are committed to your content. In addition, your most commented posts are usually the most popular posts on your blog.

This is very good, but we have to take into account one very important thing, having many comments on a post can also be harmful.

Having a lot of comments in a post means that this page is going to load more slowly, that means it can affect our SEO, since Google punishes the sites that take time to load.

The solution is simple, paginate the comments so they don’t load all at once, you can easily paginate comments in WordPress by adjusting the other comments settings in the Discussion settings menu.

Why Enable Pagination For Comments?

As we have said before, many comments in your post can slow down the loading of the page, which can affect our SEO.

In extremes, when you load too many comments, you can run out of server memory, which can make our screen appear white. Comment paging reduces the server load for your most commented posts by dividing comments into several pages.

Another reason for adding pagination to comments is when you want to hide old comments and give more preference to the newest comments.

How To Paginate Comments in WordPress

WordPress It gives us the possibility to paginate the comments, since it has that option included.

We just have to access the dashboard of our WordPress, and go to Settings → Discussions. Look for the Other comment settings section an check “Break comments into pages…”. And don’t forget to click on the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your settings.

The display of the comments buttons is based on your theme, so when you return to your posts, you will see that instead of showing all the comments it shows Previous Comments and Next comments or page numbers (1, 2, 3,…).

Also remember that you can change the style of the page by CSS. Keep in mind that if you make changes to the theme directly, when launching an update, your code will disappear unless you are using a child theme.

If you have not worked with child theme or want to learn how it works, you can check our post Create Your Genesis Child Theme

References:
manageyourlifenow.com
codexworld.com
wpbeginner.com