How to Disable Comments on WordPress Posts

How to Disable Comments on WordPress Posts
One common problem facing WordPress users is the amount of spam comments.

There are some spam-fighting tools such as Akismet and Mollom, but some of users prefer to turn off comments entirely.

One of our students wanted to disable WordPress comments, so we created this step-by-step tutorial for him.

  • Go to Settings > Discussion.
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Uncheck the “Allow people to post comments on new articles” and the “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) ” settings.

The pingbacks feature of WordPress is like commenting for computers. It allows other blogs to leave a comment/link on your blog to their blog if they mention you. Unfortunately, in many cases it’s not useful and is a bit like link-spam.

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Finally, at the bottom, save your changes and you’re done. If for some reason you still get commenting at the bottom of some posts, you’ll need to go to those individual posts and uncheck the settings for commenting.

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If you want to go a step further and completely remove all traces of comments or comment features from your site, we recommend the Disable Comments plugin. This plugin allows administrators to globally disable comments on any post type (posts, pages, attachments, etc.) so that these settings cannot be overridden for individual posts. It also removes all comment-related fields from edit and quick-edit screens.
If you don’t want to disable comments entirely, this video from the WordPress Beginner Class can help.  Or check out our YouTube WordPress Series Videos.

Instructor

  • Nick Savov

    Nick is the Director of Support at OSTraining and you can find him in almost every area of the site, from answering support requests and account questions to creating tutorials and software.

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warnerchad

I agree that the Disable Comments plugin works great for totally disabling commenting site-wide. Alternatively, if you want to disable comments on an existing site, in Settings > Discussion, set Automatically close comments on articles older than __ days to 0. You can also [url=http://wordpress.tv/2009/01/14/using-quick-edit-and-bulk-edit-to-manage-your-posts-in-half-the-time/]bulk edit posts/pages[/url] to quickly disable comments on multiple posts/pages.

Yogesh Shinde

That’s really a cool hack Chad. Thanks!

Jade Clair

I am using free version of akismet for a long time for my wordpress sites, it works great actually. Didn’t need to disable all the comments.

umapathy sekar

Very difficult topic you picked and it is still to say definitely about two of its options. You well covered all the merits and demerits and did full justice with the topic.
I think it also depends upon the niche of one’s blog. If niche relates to an industry where nothing is worthy of selling then obviously he has to rely on PPC options to earn money. For that he needs not to build a community.
Yes for those blogging on popular niche they must continue commenting option and should not think to disable it. They can’t make money without building a community and commenting plays a big role for this task.
Thanks a lot for sharing this very debate igniting post.

umapathy sekar

Blog commenting has its purpose, to allow the reader to express their thoughts and provide an interaction with the writer and other readers. Of course its detrimental when someone comes and do Spam links but easily blocked.

Mamta bhadu

Thank you so much. I use twenty sixteen theme and have been looking for sometime to turn comments on for pages. I was half right but didn’t tick allow comments at bottom! Thank you i had just about given UP.

Wordpress Dev

The “Disable Comments plugin DOES NOT WORK GREAT seeing as it has ad-scripts running in the background” 

personal trainer Teddington

Nice Blog! thank you for sharing this kind of information….

Miley Cryus

I appreciate to blogger for wonderful post. will definitely share this blog to my group.

Akpotohor Sunday

This is so amazing i have never seen this kind of content before. 

Steven

Thanks for tutorials

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