Do you want to disable or turn off the comments on WordPress posts and pages? Good News for you! WordPress offers very simple and easy inbuilt features for disabling comments on WordPress posts and/or pages. You can either disable comments on specific posts, pages (both in existing and new posts and pages) or you can completely remove comments from your entire website. In this article, you will find a complete step by step guide on how to disable comments in WordPress.
Important Note:
Once you disable/turn off or remove the comment box on WordPress posts and pages, it will only hide your comment box as well as previous comments on your existing posts and pages but your comments will not be deleted from your site. So, if you want to disable comments as well as delete comments, then with this tutorial follow another tutorial on How To Delete the WordPress comments.
When Should you Disable the WordPress Comments?
One of the biggest advantages of the WordPress comment box is that it helps to improve your blog articles, services, products through the interaction with your site’s visitors. However, besides some benefits of using the WordPress comment box, there are some specific cons of using the WordPress comment section.
Here we have listed down some reasons for that you may not want to allow comments on your posts or pages.
1. Maybe you have a small business website with some static pages like services, about us, contact us, about me. In such cases, you may want to disable or turn off your comment section.
2. If you receive lots of comments on a particular post or page, it may slow down the page loading speed and it will hurt your SEO and ranking. In that case, you may break the comments into pages with 20 or 30 comments per page or you may remove your comment box.
2. Also, if you are receiving tons of spammy comments, it is better to disable the comment section to prevent spam. Although there are some other ways to protect your website from spam comments, disabling the comment section will completely protect your site from spam.
3. In other cases, sometimes the site visitors put offensive and hurtful comments. It will hurt your real visitors. More than that, to reply and moderate comments, you need lots of time. In that case, to save your time, you may want to remove or hide your comments box.
For any reason, if you want to disable WordPress comments, follow the steps below.
There are many ways to disable WordPress comments. Here we have discussed the following two methods.
- Automatically disable comments using standard WordPress dashboard settings
- Disable comments using a plugin
Disable Comments on All Future Posts Using WordPress Dashboard Settings
WordPress has an inbuilt feature for disabling comments on all future posts or new articles. So, let’s follow the steps below.
1. Login to your WordPress dashboard.
2. On your WordPress dashboard, navigate to Settings >> Discussion Settings from the left sidebar of your admin panel.
3. Uncheck the option called ‘Allow people to post comments on articles’ as you see in the picture below.
4. Scroll down and click on ‘Save Changes’. Once you click on the ‘Save Changes’ button, it will basically remove the comment box (also called ‘Leave a Reply’ section) from the end of your posts and your visitors will not find any comment box to post their comments. However, sometimes after disabling comments, the ‘comments are closed’ text appears at the end of the WordPress posts. If it is there, then follow the tutorial on How to Remove ‘comments are closed’ text from WordPress posts and pages.
Note that it will disable comments on all the future/new posts which are not yet published. However, it will not apply to your existing which are already published.
So, now you have learned how to remove comments on all future posts. Next, if you want to disable comments on the existing or published posts and pages, don’t stop reading this article.
Disable Comments on a Single Post or Page via WordPress Dashboard
If you chose not to disable comments on all the future posts automatically, you could turn off comments for a specific post or Page by using WordPress inbuilt feature. Let’s look at the steps below.
1. Go to your WordPress dashboard.
2. On your WordPress dashboard, go to Posts >> All Posts from the left sidebar. For pages, go to Pages >> All Pages section.
3. Make Sure that the comments box is checked under the ‘Screen Options’ as you see in the picture below.
4. Next, click on the Quick Edit link of a specific post or page. You will find the Quick Edit link of a specific post or page when you will hover your cursor over the title of a post or page.
4. Scroll down to the Discussion section, uncheck the ‘Allow Comments’ box.
5. Don’t forget to click on the Update button. Once you click on the ‘Update’ button, it will basically remove the comment box (also called ‘Leave a Reply’ section) from the end of your post or page and the ‘Leave a Reply’ box will not be visible for your site visitors.
Note that this method is applicable to both existing as well as future posts or pages.
Disable All Comments on all Posts and Pages (Entire Site) via WordPress Dashboard
If you want to disable/turn off WordPress comment box on all posts and pages without doing it individually for each post and page, follow the steps below.
1. Go to Posts >> All Posts (or Pages >> All Pages) from the left sidebar.
2. Make Sure that the comments box is checked under the ‘Screen Options’ on top of the page.
2. Check the box next to the Title. It will select all the posts or pages available on that screen. Next, select Edit from Bulk Actions dropdown box and then click on ‘Apply.’
3. Next, look at the right side of your screen. There, next to the Comments section select ‘Do Not Allow’ from the dropdown box and click on Update.
This will disable all comments on all posts and pages as well as remove the comment box. Note that it will only apply to all existing as well as new (not published but saved as a draft) posts or pages.
Disable Comments on WordPress Media Attachments
If you want to disable comments on media or attachment, follow the steps below.
1. On your WordPress dashboard, go to Media >> Library
2. Click on the ‘Edit’ button. You will find the Edit link of a specific media file when you will hover your cursor over the media file.
3. Scroll down a little bit and uncheck the Allow comments box under the ‘Discussion’ section.
4. Click on ‘Update’. You are done.
Unfortunately, from your WordPress dashboard, you can not disable comments on all of your media files at a time. You have to do it one by one. If you don’t want to turn off comments manually on individual media attachment files, you may disable comments on all media attachments using Disable Comments plugin which is discussed below.
Disable WordPress Comments Using a Plugin
Don’t want to do it manually? The are many plugins available to disable comments on your WordPress. Here, we will show you how to disable all WordPress comments using the ‘Disable Comments plugin’.
1. Install and activate the Disable Comments plugin.
2. Go to Settings >> Disable Comments from the left sidebar
3. On your Disable Comments plugin settings page, if you select the first option, it will disable comments everywhere. Using the second option, you will able to selectively disable comments on your posts, pages, or media.
We hope that from this article, you have learned how to disable comments on WordPress posts and pages.
