Lazy Load for Comments

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.

A long thread pulls in dozens of avatars, gravatar lookups and reply scripts — all downloaded before the visitor has reached them, and most of them never seen. Version 2 fetches the rendered comments over the WordPress REST API instead, on demand, without changing how your comment template looks.

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.

Choosing a load method

Everything lives under Comments → Lazy Load. The Load Method decides when comments appear:

A Minimum Comments threshold skips 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.

Skipping one post

Settings apply site-wide, but a filter opts individual posts out — useful for a page whose discussion is the reason people arrive:

add_filter( 'lazy_load_for_comments_can_lazy_load', function ( $can ) {
	if ( is_page( 'contact' ) ) {
		return false;
	}

	return $can;
} );

What it does not do

It handles the default WordPress comment system only. Disqus, Jetpack Comments and other third-party systems replace the comment area with their own embed, so there is nothing left for this plugin to defer — for Disqus, Disqus Conditional Load does the same job.