The WordPress comment section is a great way to engage your visitors by providing a platform to interact. They can share their thoughts, ask doubts, and interact with other commenters on the website. So, it’s been enabled by default on all WordPress installations except you have some custom themes or plugins on top. Because of its ability to increase the features of your site and have a great platform to engage visitors resulting in a better on-page time, it is always recommended to have a comment section on your posts or pages.
However, this is not the case with every website out there. For example, if you are running an eCommerce website where the comments are managed by a third-party reviews section, or you are writing about a controversial topic and you do not wanna fight with the visitors, turning off comments on your WordPress site becomes a necessity. That is what we are going to explain in this guide on disabling WordPress comments.
Disable Comments from Discussion Settings (Future Posts)
The simplest way to disable comments on your posts or pages is by navigating to Settings > Discussion from your WordPress dashboard. There you can find a ton of options to control how the comment system works on your WordPress website.
- Allow people to submit comments on new posts: Unchecking this checkbox will disable comments on all the upcoming articles. Note that this won’t remove the comments from the old posts that already has some comments on it.
- Users must be registered and logged in to comment: You can disable the WordPress comment system for non-logged in users. They will be able to post comments after creating an account on the website.
- Comment must be manually approved: This allows stopping any spam comments. Each comment should be manually approved by the administrator before going live.
So, you can control the future comments this way. If you want to delete all the previous comments as well, you can do that which will make your website comment-free. Make sure that you take a backup of your website before deleting the comments.
Disable WordPress Comment using Plugin (All Posts)
There are a few plugins that allow you to control the WordPress comment system. Disable comments is one such plugin that will let you disable the native WordPress comment system. Just install the plugin and use the features to disable the comments on your WordPress website.
Disable Comments on Specific Posts
If you want to disable the comments on specific pages or posts, all you have to do is using the Quick Edit feature and unchecking the “Allow Comments” checkbox. In order to do that,
- Navigate to Posts in your WordPress dashboard.
- Find the specific post you want to disable comments on.
- Click on the Quick Edit under the post title by hovering the mouse over it.
- Uncheck the box Allow Comments.
- Click the Update button.
That’s how you disable comments on a desired post or page. Simple and achievable without utilizing any plugins.
I’ve been trying to figure this out for a while. Finally, I was able to delete all the comments on the site. I was able to figure out the Discussion section myself, however, I had no idea about deleting the already existing comments on the site. Thanks for the guide.
I didn’t know disabling comments on individual posts and pages were too easy. I’ve been trying some complex plugins and other things to disable the comments. I think I am not that good with WordPress. Time to learn more.
Seriously man… Faced the same issue. I wasn’t sure how to do a simple thing.