Did you notice that there was a slight change in the comment form fields in WordPress 4.4? The comment textarea is moved to the top whereas the Name, Email, and Website field is moved to the bottom. One of our readers asked if there was a way move back the comment text field to the bottom. Yes, there is because we did it on our site. In this article, we will show you how to move comment text field to the bottom in WordPress 4.4 and later versions.
Why Comment Form Text Layout Was Changed?
The decision to move the comment form text field to the bottom was made to fix a bug in WordPress comment form layout.
Previously when users clicked on reply button they were taken to the comment text area. If a user was on desktop, then they can clearly see that they need to fill in the name and email fields first.
But on mobile, users may not even see the comment name and email fields. They may write and submit a comment only to return back with an error that they forgot to enter name and email fields.
This was bad from usability and accessibility point of view and WordPress 4.4 addressed that issue.
This is how the default comment form looks like now.
While this change improves usability, some site owners believe that their users are used to the old layout and want to switch back. Here is how you can do that.
Moving the Comment Text Field to Bottom
Simply add this code snippet in your theme’s functions.php file or in a site-specific plugin.
function wpb_move_comment_field_to_bottom( $fields ) {
$comment_field = $fields[‘comment’];
unset( $fields[‘comment’] );
$fields[‘comment’] = $comment_field;
return $fields;
}
add_filter( ‘comment_form_fields’, ‘wpb_move_comment_field_to_bottom’ );
That’s all, you can now visit a post on your website as a logged out user and see the change in action.
We hope this article helped you move comment text field to the bottom in WordPress 4.4. You may also want to see our guide on how to improve WordPress comments with De:comments.
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