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How to Limit Comment Length in WordPress

  • Last Updated: July 29, 2024

Are you tired of dealing with overly long or unhelpful comments on your WordPress site? Limiting the length of comments can significantly improve the quality of discussions and reduce spam.

In this guide, I’ll walk you through the simple steps to set a minimum and maximum character limit for comments.

Why Limit Comment Length?

An active comments section is a great way to foster engagement and build a community around your blog. However, not all comments are valuable. Here are a few reasons why you might want to limit comment length:

  • One-word comments are usually not helpful and are often spam attempts to get backlinks.
  • Extremely long comments (over 5,000 characters) are often rants, complaints, or irrelevant to the article.
  • Short comments (under 60 characters) rarely contribute meaningful insights or feedback.

By setting comment length limits, you can discourage spam, rants, and low-quality comments, ultimately improving the overall discussion quality on your site.

Setting Comment Length Limits in WordPress

Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t offer a built-in way to limit comment length. However, you can easily achieve this by adding a code snippet to your site. To ensure safety and avoid breaking your site, we recommend using the Code Snippets plugin.

  1. Install and activate the Code Snippets plugin. You can find detailed instructions on how to install a WordPress plugin in our beginner’s guide.
  2. Once activated, go to Code Snippets > + Add Snippet in your WordPress admin area.
  3. Click the “Use Snippet” button under “Add Your Custom Code (New Snippet)”.
<?php
// Limit the comment length to 6000 characters and a minimum of 50 characters in WordPress
add_filter( 'preprocess_comment', 'smartwp_limit_comment_length' );
function smartwp_limit_comment_length( $comment ) {
// Limit the comments to 6000 characters
if ( strlen( $comment['comment_content'] ) > 6000 ) {
wp_die('Comment is too long. Comments must be under 6000 characters.');
}
// Require 50 characters to leave a comment
if ( strlen( $comment['comment_content'] ) < 50 ) {
wp_die('Comment is too short. Comments must be at least 50 characters.');
}
return $comment;
}
view raw limit-comment-length.php hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Modify the numbers 6000 and 50 to set your desired maximum and minimum character limits, respectively.

That’s it! Your comment length limits are now in effect. When users attempt to submit a comment that’s too short or too long, they’ll see the custom error message you’ve set.

Conditional Logic (Optional)

If you only want to limit comment length on specific pages or posts, you can use the Conditional Logic feature in Code Snippets. Enable the “Conditional Logic” toggle and set the conditions for when the code snippet should be executed (e.g., specific page URLs).

<?php
// Limit the comment length to 6000 characters and a minimum of 50 characters in WordPress for a specific post
add_filter('preprocess_comment', 'smartwp_limit_comment_length');
function smartwp_limit_comment_length($comment) {
// Specify the post ID where you want this function to run
$specific_post_id = 123; // Replace 123 with your desired post ID
// Check if the current post is the specific post we want to target
if (get_the_ID() == $specific_post_id) {
// Limit the comments to 6000 characters
if (strlen($comment['comment_content']) > 6000) {
wp_die('Comment is too long. Comments must be under 6000 characters.');
}
// Require 50 characters to leave a comment
if (strlen($comment['comment_content']) < 50) {
wp_die('Comment is too short. Comments must be at least 50 characters.');
}
}
return $comment;
}
view raw limit-comment-length-by-post-id.php hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Conclusion

Limiting comment length is a simple yet effective way to improve the quality of discussions on your WordPress site. By setting reasonable minimum and maximum character limits, you can discourage spam, rants, and low-quality comments, ultimately creating a more engaging and valuable comments section for your readers.

Picture of Andy Feliciotti

Andy Feliciotti

Andy has been a full time WordPress developer for over 10 years. Through his years of experience has built 100s of sites and learned plenty of tricks along the way. Found this article helpful? Buy Me A Coffee

19 Responses

  5. This is a useful article for limiting the word count of comments. And, hopefully, it will reduce spam, but you did not tell us where we need to put this PHP script (header, footer, or body section).

    Reply

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  10. To limit comment length in WordPress, you can add a code snippet to your theme’s functions.php file. This code sets minimum and maximum character limits for comments. If a comment is too short or too long, users receive an error message prompting them to adjust their comment length.

    Reply

  11. To limit comment length in WordPress, you can add a code snippet to your theme’s file. This code sets minimum and maximum character limits for comments. If a comment is too short or too long, users receive an error message prompting them to adjust their comment length.

    Reply

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