How to Disable Comments in WordPress
Do you want to disable comments in WordPress? This post is a quick guide that will help do exactly that. Although comments offer a great way to interact with visitors, there are times when you don’t want to allow visitors to post comments. The good news is that you can disable the comments on specific pages, posts, custom post types or remove the option to post comments completely.
Why disable comments
If your website doesn’t have a blog and only uses static pages such as about us, services, and contacts, it makes no sense to have the comments section. A blogger may also want to post things like announcements that they don’t want visitors to comment on. In these cases you will want to disable comments in WordPress.
Disabling comments is also done to prevent spam. Although there are some spam protection techniques available, disabling the comments all together helps solve the issue completely. Here is how you can disable the comments.
How to disable comments on future posts
After creating your website you can stop comments on future posts. You do this by going to Settings>>Discussion from the admin panel. On the page that opens uncheck the option that says, “Allow people to post comments on new articles”. Save the changes. Doing so will disable comments on all future posts.
How to disable comments on specific posts or pages
If you don’t want to disable comments on all your posts and pages, there is a way to disable them on specific posts/pages. With pages, comments are turned off by default. You can, however, enable or disable comments in WordPress on individual pages/posts. Go to Pages>>All Pages and hover the mouse over the title of the page you wish to enable/disable comments. Click on the ‘Edit’ link.
You will see 3 vertical dots icon on the top right corner of your page. Click on this to open the dropdown menu and select ‘Options’. A popup box will show. Ensure the ‘Discussion’ box is enabled. You will now see the ‘Discussion’ Meta box on the right side of the editor. Now you can go ahead and uncheck the ‘Allow Comments’ box in order to disable comments on the page. Click on ‘Update’ to save the changes. To selectively enable comments, you can check the box to enable comments on the pages you want.
How to disable comments on posts and pages in bulk
To disable comments in WordPress for all your pages and posts at once you need to go to Posts>>All Posts. Here you will see all the published posts. Select all posts and click on ‘Edit’ from the Bulk actions dropdown box. Click ‘Apply’. You will be able to do bulk actions such as change author name and turn off the comments. Select “Do not allow” from the comments dropdown box and update in order to disable all comments.
Delete all comments
To delete all existing comments, click on ‘Comments’ from the sidebar of the admin panel and select ‘Move to Trash’ from the Bulk Actions dropdown box. Apply to delete all existing comments. You may have to repeat this step several times if your website has lots of comments.