Excessive WordPress self-pinging cluttering up your comments? This simple plugin eliminates self-pings for good.
What is a WordPress Self-Ping?
When you create an internal link to another post on your own site in WordPress, it automatically sends a pingback – a notification that essentially says "Hey, I linked to you!" This is intended to track relationships between posts and help users discover related content.
Technically, here is what happens:
- Post A links to Post B
- WordPress detects this internal link
- It sends an XML-RPC notification (pingback) to the site itself
- The pingback shows up in Post B‘s comments
The problem arises when you have hundreds or thousands of interconnect posts. Self-pings can quickly accumulate, cluttering up comment sections.
Impact of Excessive Self-Pings
While good for SEO, too many self-pings can negatively affect site performance and user experience:
- Bloated Database: More pings means a bigger comments table, slowing MySQL queries.
- Slow Page Speed: More comments for WP to load and render leads to unoptimized TTFB and increased page bloat.
- Comment Frustration: Users get annoyed trying to read actual comments amongst a sea of self-ping spam.
According to benchmarks from Kinsta, sites with >50k comments can start to see major performance impacts.
No Self Ping Plugin: Optimal Solution
No Self Ping blocks these excessive self notifications from clogging your dashboard and comments.
We compared it to other self ping plugins like Remove Self Pings, and No Self Ping is the clear winner when you want simple, set-and-forget functionality.
| Plugin | Automatic | Config Required | Actively Maintained |
|---|---|---|---|
| No Self Ping | Yes | No | Yes |
| Remove Self Pings | No | Yes | No |
Lightweight with no settings required, just activate and self-pings instantly stop. One less thing slowing your site down.
Who Needs No Self Pings?
While some sites rely heavily on cross-linked content, other sites get cluttered down by too many self-pings:
- Niche Sites: Interconnected category, tag, and related posts
- News Magazines: Trending now boxes linking old evergreen articles
- Multi-Author Blogs: Writers referring to their previous posts
For these sites, No Self Ping provides a hands-off approach to stop excess self-ping clutter while retaining internal links.
Get Control Over Self Ping Spam
Instead of spending hours manually removing self-pings or disabling internal links site-wide, use this plugin to automatically prevent new self-pings going forward.
Coupled with internal linking best practices for SEO, No Self Ping gives you ultimate control over comment clutter. You get optimized interlinking without all the pingback noise.
According to the official plugin page, No Self Ping has been going strong for over 3 years with a 5-star rating. It‘s a lightweight set-it-and-forget-it solution for eliminating self-ping headaches once and for all.
