Although comments can be great for interacting with users on your WordPress website, you might want to turn them off for any reason. If that’s the case, this article shows you how to disable comments on WordPress. Let’s say if you have a WordPress blog and you often share information with your visitors, then it is desirable to have comments enabled so your visitors can voice their opinion. However, if you have a personal portfolio or website from your company, a contact form or some other static page, then comments are really not necessary. There are several ways how you can disable comments on WordPress and we will walk you through each method.
Since WordPress is great CMS system, you will find in the admin dashboard that there are options which you can use to manage comments. You can edit comments in two ways, directly from your WordPress dashboard or by using a plugin designed for this purpose. We will show both ways and highlight the advantages and disadvantages of each method.
Inside the WordPress admin dashboard, click on “Settings” and then on “Discussion.” A new page will open where you can adjust the comment settings.
Let’s say you have a blog that allows comments on posts. If you want to disable commenting on all future posts, then turn off the checkbox in front of the option “Allow people to submit comments on new posts.” This way you have disabled commenting on future posts.
If you do not want to turn off comments on your entire WordPress website, but only on individual posts, then we will explain how to do it.
Click on “Pages” and then on “All pages.” Locate the page on which you want to disable commenting and click the “Edit” button located below the page name.
After you have opened the desired page, in the upper right corner, click on the “Page” tab and then in the drop-down menu below find “Discussion.” Simply uncheck “Allow comments” and this way you have banned comments on this page. In the same way, you can ban comments on any type of post on your WordPress pages.
Did you know that you can disable comments on multiple pages at once in the same way? Wondering how? Keep reading, this is a very easy task.
Return to the admin dashboard, click on “Pages” and then on “All Pages.” After listing all your pages, check the checkbox next to each page for which you want to turn off comments. After that, in the section above pages, select “Edit” from the drop-down menu and click “Apply.”
A new, smaller window will open where you can adjust bulk options. On the right side of that window is the option “Comments.” Click the drop-down menu and select “Do not allow.” In this way you have disabled commenting on several pages at once.
We previously showed you how to disable commenting on all future posts. However, you are wondering if it is possible to delete previous comments? Of course it is possible, and we will show you how to do that. It is important to note that manually deleting comments is only recommended for smaller websites that do not have many comments, as this process can take a long time. If you have a large website with many comments from several years ago, then we recommend that you install a plugin for deleting comments.
Open the WordPress admin dashboard. On the left click on “Comments.” Mark all comments, then select “Move to Bin” from the drop-down menu and click “Apply.” This way you have deleted several marked comments.
As we already mentioned, if you have a lot of comments, then you will have to repeat this action, which can take a long time. One of the best plugins for this purpose is “WP Bulk Delete” and you can download it for free from the WordPress repository. In addition to being able to delete all comments, you have the option to delete posts, pages, users, taxonomy terms and meta fields, all depending on which filter and condition you apply.
We showed you how to disable comments manually through the admin dashboard. In the rest of the article, we will show you how to disable comments using the “Disable comments” plugin.
Open the WordPress admin dashboard, click on “Plugins” and then on “Add New.” Type “disable comments” in the search field and install the first plugin from the list. Below you can see what this plugin looks like.
This is a great plugin used by over a million WordPress sites. After you have installed and activated the plugin, click on “Settings” and then on “Disable Comments.” A new screen will open where you can adjust the functions and behavior of the plugin.
In the upper part there are 2 tabs, namely “Disable Comments” and “Delete Comments.” Within the “Disable comments” tab, you can adjust which part of your site you want to disable comments on. If you click on “Everywhere” you will disable comments globally on your entire website. If you don’t want that, then choose below which post types you want to disable comments. You can choose posts, pages, media, landing pages and events.
Once you’ve complied everything you want, click “Save changes” to save your settings.
The second tab is “Delete comments.” As its name suggests, it is used to delete comments, and you can delete all comments on your WordPress site or on certain post types.
After you have selected which comments you want to delete, click on the “Delete Comments” button and the comment deletion process will begin. If you have a large site with a lot of comments, then this process can take a long time.
It is important to note that this process cannot be reverted. That’s why we advise you to make a backup of the entire site and WordPress database before you decide to install and use any plugin.
If you have allowed comments on your pages, then you must think about the fight against SPAM messages. Fortunately, there are many SPAM protection plugins on the market, many of them are free and provide quality protection. One of the most famous SPAM protection plugins is Akismet Spam Protection. It is used on more than 5 million websites worldwide. Also great are WordFence Security, Jetpack and All In One WP Security plugins. It is important to note that some of them have commercial functions for which you will have to purchase the premium version of the plugin.
Today we have gone through how to disable comments on WordPress. To summarize, if you have a relatively small website that has a small number of comments, you should have no problem doing everything from the admin dashboard. However, if your website is large and has a lot of comments, then you need to consider installing the “Disable Comments” plugin make the task a lot easier.