A Complete Guide to Disabling Comments in Your WordPress Website

WordPress is one of the most popular Content Management Systems that allows anyone to set up a website from scratch. You can open up to the world via internet and share whatever you want to share. Users can interact with you too by sharing or commenting on your posts. When you get comments on your posts, Google sees that as highly-engaged article and would rank your content higher. But in some cases, you may want to disable comments altogether.

That’s because comments do get spammy or self-promotional at times. Moderating these comments can hamper your productivity. Therefore, disabling comments on WordPress is a great way to avoid spam on your posts.

In this article, learn how you can disable comments in WordPress with ease.

Disable WordPress Comments in Dashboard

By default, you’d have comments enabled on your WordPress website. Anyone can post a comment on any of your posts. You can easily disable it from the admin dashboard. You can disable the comments site-wide with a few clicks.

• Disabling Comments on all Future Posts

To disable comments from dashboard, navigate into Settings > Discussion. To stop comments on all existing and future posts and pages, uncheck the ‘allow people to post comments on articles’ option. This will remove the ‘Add a Comment’ option. You can also disable pingbacks and trackbacks.

In case you want to keep commenting on for certain posts or articles, then you need to go into Discussions section of that post or page and change the settings (more on that later).

• Stopping Comments on Every Published posts

If you want to stop or delete comments on the posts/pages you have on your WordPress website, then go into Dashboard > Comments. Select the comments you want to delete. Then click on Bulk Actions and select ‘Move to Trash’. Click on ‘Apply’ to delete the comments.

• Disabling Comments on Selected Posts/Pages

If you want to disable comments on selected posts in bulk, then go to All Posts. From there, select the posts for which you want to delete all the comments. Click on Bulk Actions > Edit > Apply. It will open up a window where you have to choose the ‘Do Not Allow’ option to disable comments on existing posts in bulk.

• Disabling Comments on Published Posts (individually)

Instead of disabling comments in bulk, if you want to disable comments individually, then go to All Posts and select that post/page. At the bottom, you’ll see the Discussion section. Here, you need to uncheck the ‘Allow Comments’ option. If you do not see the Discussions section, then it might be disabled. You need to enable it from the Screen Options. You can also disable comments on specific published post using Quick Edit.

• Disabling Comments on media files

When you include a media file into your posts, WordPress creates an attachment file. Even if you disable comments for the post, these attachment files will continue to receive comments. To disable comments for media files, you need to go into Media Library. Locate the media file and then click on Edit. You’ll come across a discussion box that’s similar to the text editor. You need to disable commenting in here.

• Other options in Discussion panel

Besides disabling comments, WordPress gives you lot of other control options. Some of them are:

• Having moderators approve the comments manually before they go live on site. This can prevent a lot of spams getting into the comment section but manual process takes a lot of time
• Blacklist certain IP addresses, email IDs, or usernames so they can no longer post comments on your website
• Asking the users to register or sign up before they can post a comment
• Approving comment authors
• Limiting the use of hyperlinks in the comment section
• Getting notified for comments and approvals

Enable or disable these additional options as per your preference.

Use Plugins for Disabling Comments

In WordPress, there are plugins available for nearly every task. And that’s the case here to. You can use a plugin like Disable Comments to manage the comment section. Disable Comments can even be extended to multiple websites and it will prevent comments from every page or blog post. To start using, install the plugin and create an account. Depending on your usage, you may have to get a paid plan.

So those were the two ways of dealing with comments on your WordPress website.