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How To Disable WordPress Comments
WordPress comments are great for engagement with readers of your blog. However, they can be a source of spam by online bots and other malicious entities trying to promote their agendas. Because of this, sometimes it’s just best to disable comments from your blog. In this article, we’ll look at how to disable comments on your WordPress blog.
Another great reason to disable comments is to improve blog page loading speed. A blog article with tens of comments can make the page load slowly and hurt your SEO efforts.
Disable comments on a single article
Disabling comments on a single article is easy. Go to the post edit page that you’d like to edit and scroll down to the Discussion page. Uncheck the box next to both the Allow Comments and Allow trackbacks and pingbacks on this page then save your post. When you do this, the comments form on the front-end gets disabled. Any existing comments that you have will still show up but users will not be able to enter any new comments. This option is usually great for old articles where you don’t want users to continue posting comments to the article.
Disable Comments Across The Whole Site
Although WordPress enables comments by default, you can easily change this in the settings area. Head on to Settings -> Discussions. You want to uncheck the checkbox next to ” Allow people to post comments on new articles”
By making changes to the settings area, new articles will have comments disabled. If you have existing articles with comments enabled, you’ll need to use a plugin to effectively deal with it.
Disable Comments With A Plugin
If you don’t want comments on your WordPress website entirely, then you should look at a plugin such as Disable Comments. This plugin effectively removes comments from all post types and all comment-related fields on the edit page. If you have a multisite installation, you can effectively disable comments across the entire network.
The Disable Comments plugin makes a number of changes when enabled:
- all comment links are hidden from the admin dashboard,
- all comment-related widgets are also disabled so you can’t use them,
- all comments in RSS/Atom feeds are disabled so you don’t get any comments,
- All pingback headers are disabled as well.
Disabling Comments Conclusion
While smaller websites can manage comments by simply changing settings on WordPress settings page, larger sites can struggle with managing comments and need to use third-party tools. Comments on WordPress can be disabled easily by using one of the options listed above depending on what you’d like to achieve. Put these ideas to use and let me know what your experience is in the comments below.
Did you like this tutorial? If you did, check out more of my WordPress how to content!