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 if 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 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.
Reasons to disable WordPress comments
There are several reasons why someone might want to disable the WordPress comments feature. Some of them are given below –
- To reduce spam on the website that might get accumulated from the comments.
- To reduce the amount of user-generated content for SEO purposes.
- For development purposes, such as working on improving the existing comment system.
- If you are developing a separate comments feature that doesn’t utilize the default WordPress comments.
- If none of the users are engaging with the comments, and you think that it is just an extra load on the website.
- You want to focus more on the content without having to deal with approving and editing the 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 upcoming articles. Note that this won’t remove the comments from the old posts that already have some comments on them.
- 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.
Note that this will not disable comments on the previous posts. Also, you might want to turn off pingbacks & trackbacks from Settings > Comments if you don’t want anything to accumulate in the comments section.
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. Also, check the WordPress comment plugins if you want to control certain functionalities.
Disable Comments on Specific Posts
If you want to disable the comments on specific pages or posts, all you have to do is use the Quick Edit feature and uncheck 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. This will show a message that the comments are closed, based on your theme and plugin setup.
Comments are disabled, but still getting spam
If you are still receiving spam comments, even after disabling the comment functionality, you should make sure that it is not disabled only for certain users, such as those who are not logged in. If that is the case, others might still be able to comment on your posts. You may also use a spam filter plugin such as Akismet.
