Foxe What it does
Lazy Load for Comments holds back the WordPress comments section until the reader scrolls to it or asks for it, so pages with long comment threads load fast up front.
Why it exists
Not every visitor reads the comments — but every visitor pays for loading them. This plugin defers that cost to the moment it’s actually needed. Maintained since 2016.
How loading works
Everything lives under Comments → Lazy Load in the WordPress admin. The Load Method decides when comments appear:
- On scroll — comments fetch automatically as the reader nears them. This is the default and the smoothest option.
- On button click — nothing loads until the reader clicks a Load Comments button you can label and style yourself.
- Disabled — lazy loading is off; comments load with the page, exactly like stock WordPress.
A Minimum Comments threshold lets you skip lazy loading on lightly-discussed
posts — with the default of 1, posts with no comments yet still show the form
normally so readers can leave the first one. An optional spinner covers the brief
fetch.
Customising the button
With the On button click method you control the button end to end: its text, whether it inherits your theme’s button style or uses the plugin’s minimal built-in style, and any extra CSS classes you want to hang your own styling on.
SEO-safe by default
Lazy loaded comments are fetched with JavaScript, so Disable for Search Engines serves the full comment markup to crawlers instead — keeping that content indexable. Leave it on.
Caching on block themes
On block themes the plugin caches the serialized core/comments block in a
transient the first time a post is viewed, so the REST endpoint re-renders from the
cache instead of parsing the block tree on every request. The cache clears itself
when you switch themes, and an admin-only Clear comments cache action flushes it
on demand after template changes.