Recent comments with the author avatar and remove comment author link in WordPress

In this article i will tell you how to display the author’s avatar beside author name and removing comment author link also (without plugins).

If you are using WordPress (WP) Recent Comments Widget and you also want to show author’s avatars along with their name in comment on your articles then you can do follow these steps (for example: we are using Recent Comments Widget on the right sidebar, look at it for vision) :

Solution 1 (changed WP core file).

The code of recent comments in : /wp-includes/widgets/class-wp-widget-recent-comments.php

so you can go to this file and open it in Code Editor and finding this section of the code (line: 116 with WP version: 4.4+ ):

'<span class="comment-author-link">' . get_comment_author_link( $comment ) . '</span>',

and replace it with:

'<span class="comment-author-link">' . get_avatar( $comment->comment_author_email, 60 ) . get_comment_author_link( $comment ) . '</span>',

Note: we don’t recommend this method because its core file changed and you may also lost this changed when updating to new WordPress version (we want to let you know exactly what we working that’s more clarify)

Solution 2 (using functions.php file)

With this solution we will use a new hooked function to overwrite get_comment_author_link() function to display author’s avatar. To do this please openfunctions.php file of your theme, this file is in location: /wp-content/themes/your-theme/ then putting the following code below into it (maybe at the end of file):

if( !is_admin() ){
   add_filter( 'get_comment_author_link', 'custom_comment_author_link', 10, 3 );
}
function custom_comment_author_link( $return, $author, $comment_id ) {
    $comment = get_comment( $comment_id );
    $avatar = get_avatar( $comment->comment_author_email, 60 );
    return $avatar.$author;
}

Above code will help you display author’s avatar along with name in their comment and remove comment author link also (you wont worry about external/follow links or something like that).

CSS code (for reference):

.recentcomments .comment-author-link img.avatar{float: left; padding: 3px; margin-right: 7px; border-radius: 50%;}
.recentcomments .comment-author-link a.url{color: #636363;}
#recentcomments li.recentcomments{border-bottom: 1px solid #d3d3d3; padding: 12px 0;}
#recentcomments li.recentcomments a:hover{color: #00a0d2;}
#recentcomments li.recentcomments span.comment-author-link:hover{color: #00a0d2;}

Bonus (remove author’s reply comments)

If you want to display the comments of visitors/customers only by removing author’s reply comments. To do this you also open functions.php file (solution 2) and put this code snippet into it:

add_filter('widget_comments_args', 'oiw_widget_comments_args');
function oiw_widget_comments_args($array){
    $array['user_id'] = 'comment';
    return $array;
} 

I hope this will be useful for you.