Do you want to know how to disable WordPress comments? While comments are an excellent way to communicate with your site visitors, some website owners prefer not to allow them.
You may hide comments on certain articles, pages, and custom post kinds, or even totally delete them from your entire website, thanks to WordPress.
We’ll walk you through how to disable comments in WordPress step by step in this tutorial.
Why is it necessary to disable comments in WordPress?
There are a variety of reasons why you might wish to disable comments on your entire website or turn off comments on individual posts or pages.
Bloggers, for example, may choose not to allow comments on specific postings, such as announcements. You can easily block comments on certain specific posts or pages in these circumstances.
WordPress is used by many small company owners to build their websites. These corporate websites frequently lack a blog component and instead focus on static pages such as services, about us, contact, and so on. Allowing comments makes no sense in these situations.
Another prevalent issue is that some business sites disable comments entirely in order to avoid spam. Although you can always utilize spam prevention tactics (which we’ll discuss later in this post), turning off the comment section will almost certainly eliminate the problem.
Whatever your reason, you may disable comments and even delete the comment section entirely from your WordPress site.
A quick summary of what you’ll learn in this post is as follows:
- Comments on future posts will be disabled.
- Commenting on a specific page or post is disabled.
- Bulk Disable Comments on Pages and Posts
- Delete all comments on WordPress
- Commenting on media is disabled.
- Using a plugin, disable WordPress comments across the board.
- In WordPress, remove the “Comments are closed” message.
- Techniques to Prevent Spam
The first several techniques will show you how to deactivate comments without requiring a plugin on pages, posts, or media. We’ll go through how to use a plugin to remove the comment section from your WordPress site later.
Comments on future posts will be disabled.
If you’re just getting started with WordPress, you can quickly disable comments on future posts.
To do so, go to Settings » Discussion in your WordPress admin panel’s left sidebar.
Uncheck the box that says “Allow people to submit comments on new articles” on this page, then click the Save Changes button to save your changes.
All future comments on your posts will be disabled as a result of this. You can still allow or disallow comments on a single article without changing this setting.
We’ll go over that in more detail in the next part.
Commenting on a specific page or post is disabled.
Comments are disabled by default on all of your pages.
WordPress, on the other hand, allows you to enable or disable comments on particular pages and articles.
From the left sidebar, navigate to Pages » All Pages. On the following page, hover your mouse cursor over the title of the page you wish to enable or disable comments on, and then click the Edit option.
The three vertical dots icon can be seen in the top-right corner of your page. You must first click on it to bring up a dropdown menu, then select Options.
This will bring up a popup box, and you’ll want to make sure the Discussion box is checked.
You’ll see the Discussion meta box on the right side of your editor once you close this modal box. If you don’t see it, make sure you’re viewing it from the Document tab.
To disable comments on this page, tick the Allow Comments box and click Update to save your changes.
On the other hand, if you only want to enable comments on certain pages, you may simply check the box.
Turning off comments on individual posts or other custom post kinds can be done in the same way.
Bulk Disable Comments on Pages and Posts
Want to turn off comments on all of your published posts and pages without having to do it one at a time? That is possible without the usage of a plugin.
To begin, navigate to Posts » All Posts to view all of your articles.
Select all of the posts, then click Apply after selecting Edit from the Bulk Actions dropdown box.
You can now execute bulk actions on all of the selected posts, such as altering the author name and turning off comments.
Click Update after selecting Do not allow from the comments menu box. This will turn off comments on all of the posts you’ve chosen.
You can disable comments on your pages using the same method.
Delete all comments on WordPress
While the methods above will disable comments on your posts and pages, they will not erase them from your WordPress site.
Click Comments on the left sidebar of your admin panel to erase all of the comments on your site.
After that, select all of the comments and select Move to Trash from the Bulk Actions menu box before clicking Apply. This will remove all of your site’s existing comments.
If your website has a large number of comments, you may need to repeat this process several times
Commenting on media is disabled.
If you want to deactivate comments on media pages, you can do so in one of two methods.
You can either deactivate comments on each media attachment files manually using the methods described above, but this is time-intensive.
Using a code snippet is an easier approach to deactivate comments on all media assets in bulk. Simply insert the code below into the functions.php file of your theme or a site-specific plugin.
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function filter_media_comment_status( $open, $post_id ) { $post = get_post( $post_id ); if( $post->post_type == 'attachment' ) { return false; } return $open;}add_filter( 'comments_open', 'filter_media_comment_status', 10 , 2 ); |
If you’re not satisfied with the previous option, continue reading to the next part, where we’ll show you how to disable comments on Media attachments using a plugin.
Using a Plugin, you can easily disable WordPress comments.
If you don’t want to block comments manually, you can do so with a single click using the Disable Comments plugin.
It allows you to turn off comments altogether on your WordPress site. You can also turn them off for individual post kinds like posts, pages, and media. It also hides the comment box and disables the display of previous comments.
Installing and activating the Disable Comments plugin is the first step. For further instructions, see our step-by-step tutorial on how to install a WordPress plugin.
After enabling the plugin, go to Settings » Disable Comments on your admin panel’s left sidebar.
You can deactivate comments throughout your entire WordPress site by selecting the ‘Everywhere’ option. The comments menu item will be removed from your WordPress admin area as well.
You can selectively disable comments on your posts, pages, or media if you choose the second option, ‘On Specific Post Types.’
For example, if you only want to remove comments from media attachments, check the Media checkbox after selecting the On-Specific Post Types radio choice.
If you only want to disable comments on WordPress pages, you may do the same. The simplest approach to deactivate comments on WordPress sites is to use the plugin.
When you’re finished, click the Save Changes button to finish the process.
In WordPress, remove the phrase “Comments Are Closed.”
If your WordPress theme does not properly check the comment status, it may continue displaying the comment form, existing comments, or even the notice “Comments are closed.”
Because this is not a standard compliant solution, you can ask your theme developer to fix it.
You can also try to fix it yourself by following the steps outlined below.
To begin, use an FTP client or the File Manager in your WordPress hosting control panel to connect to your WordPress site. Now go to your current theme folder, which is located in the /wp-content/themes/ directory.
You must locate the file comments.php in your theme folder, right-click it, and rename it to comments old.php.
Next, select Create a new file from the right-click menu in your FTP client’s right panel. Then give your new file a name like comments.php and hit the OK button.
This method simply adds an empty comments template to your WordPress theme, preventing any comments or associated messages from being displayed.
If the comments.php file does not exist in your WordPress theme, you will need to contact your theme developer which file you need to change.
Techniques to Prevent Spam
If you’re intending to disable WordPress comments only to protect your site from spammers and link builders, we recommend that you instead employ some of the tactics listed below to combat spam.
Akismet
One of the greatest plugins for dealing with spam comments is Akismet. The best thing is that it was created by the WordPress team.
Final Thoughts
Did you know that after a specific amount of time, you can close comments?
Check the box that says “Automatically close comments on items older than 14 days” under Settings » Discussion.
This will automatically close the comments form after 14 days. You can also adjust the number of days according to your need.
Because spammers are more likely to target older articles, some users have changed this setting to 180 days, which dramatically lowers spam.
Antispam Bee in a Honeypot
On WPExpertPro, we’ve discovered that using a second plugin called Antispam Bee in conjunction with Akismet helps to drastically minimize comment spam on your site.
It also includes an unnoticed honeypot that filters out 99 percent of spam bot comments.
Comment Captcha
Adding a captcha to your comment form isn’t particularly user-friendly, but it does help safeguard your site from spammers.
To add Google reCaptcha directly before the submit button of your comment form, utilize the Advanced noCaptcha and Invisible Captcha plugins.
Form Field with Website URL Removed
Remove the website URL field from the comment form as another measure to combat link builders and spammers. Take a look at this example from the WPForms website:
You can also use the Comment Link Remove and Comments Tool plugins to accomplish this. Without modifying a single line of code, you can remove the website URL box from your comment form. Isn’t that fantastic?
Blocking Bad IP Addresses
Bad IP addresses can also be blocked from accessing your WordPress site. This will assist you in thwarting spammers and hacker attempts.
Anyway, we hope this comprehensive tutorial on entirely disabling comments in WordPress, both with and without the use of a plugin, was helpful.