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How to disable comments in WordPress

WordPress CommentsSource: pixelcreatures / Pixabay.com
WordPress Comments / Image Source: pixelcreatures – Pixabay.com / CC0 Public Domain

The built-in comment feature in WordPress is fantastic to get in touch with your visitors and receive valuable feedback from your readers or start active discussions. However, depending on the type of your website, you may want to disable comments in WordPress. The reason could be that the comment feature just isn’t suitable for your website or because you’re receiving a lot of comment spam. In this tutorial you’ll learn how to disable comments on your WordPress website or blog.

Disabling comments on your WordPress website

By default, comments for posts are globally enabled in WordPress. If you want to completely deactivate the comment feature in WordPress, this can be quite a challenge because the available option to deactivate comments will only take effect for new posts. That means the comment feature for posts that already have been published before the change will still be active.

To disable comments for new posts on your WordPress website, please navigate to Settings => Discussion in your WordPress dashboard and uncheck the particular checkbox for comments. Keep in mind what has been said before, this setting however does not apply to already published posts.

Important: After you’ve turned off comments, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the comment count on your website will automatically disappear. It just prevents that people can leave new comments. If you want to remove the comment count which may appear on posts, archives or within widgets, you need to check your WordPress theme if there is such an option available or hide it with CSS.

Deactivate comments for published posts

Comments Posts Pages
Image Source: geralt – Pixabay.com / License: CC0 Public Domain

After you’ve disabled comments for new posts in WordPress, you may want to get rid of the comment feature for already published posts as well. This usually is the case if you don’t make use of comments on your WordPress website. Another possible scenario is that you may want to end a discussion on a certian topic or you’re getting lots of spam comments for particular posts.

To turn off comments for single posts in WordPress, please navigate to Posts in your WordPress dashboard, find the post you want to disable the comments for and use the Quick Edit function to do so. You can see this in detail when having a look at the video in the previous section of this guide.

Globally disable comments with WordPress plugins

Disable Comments Plugin
Image Source: Screenshot – WordPress.org

In case you have a bunch of already published posts on your website and do not want to disable comments manually on each one of them (although bulk editing is available in WordPress), you can use certain plugins for this purpose. Using WordPress plugins to disable comments can be an alternative. These kind of plugins can do the work for you, for example Disable Comments.

With this WordPress plugin you can globally turn off comments on your WordPress website. Just download it from the WordPress Plugin Directory and get rid of the comment feature on your WordPress website. There are alternative 3rd party plugins available as well.

The information in this tutorial also has been helpful for users with the following questions:

  • How to disable comments for old posts?
  • Disable comments on WordPress pages
  • Deactivate comment feature in WordPress
  • Which plugin can disable comments in WordPress?
  • Get rid of comment function in WordPress
  • How to close comments on WordPress posts?

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