Good and bad reasons to disable comments in WordPress
Why Disable Comments in WordPress?
Many small business owners use WordPress to create their website. These business websites often doesn’t have a blog section and mostly has static pages like services, about us, contact, etc. In such cases, it doesn’t make sense to allow comments at all.
In other cases, bloggers may publish certain posts like announcements that they don’t want to allow comments to trolls. In these cases, you can easily disable comments on those specific posts or pages.
The other scenario is some business blogs choose to disable comments entirely to prevent spam. Although you can always use spam protection techniques (which we’ll share later in this article), disabling the comment section will definitely solve the problem.
Whatever your reason may be, you can certainly disable comments and even remove the comment section from your WordPress site.
Here’s a quick overview of what you’ll learn in this article:
- Disable Comments on Future Posts
- Disable Comments on a Specific Page or Post
- Disable Comments on Pages and Posts in Bulk
- Delete All WordPress Comments
- Disable Comments on Media
- Disable WordPress Comments Sitewide using a Plugin
- Remove “Comments are closed” in WordPress
- Spam Protection Techniques
Disable comments in WordPress using standard dashboard settings
By default, WordPress enables comments on all posts, and disables comments on all pages. You can change this to disable / enable comments completely (site wide), or selectively on some posts and pages. You can also regulate comments in many ways using the options in the Settings page.
The place to start managing comments is Settings > Discussion in your WordPress Dashboard.
1. To stop comments on all future posts (and pages):
Uncheck the option “allow people to post comments on articles”. You can also disable pingbacks and trackbacks here. This will stop comments and pings entirely on all future posts on your site. (Pages are disabled by default).
If you wish to allow comments on individual posts or articles, you can do so by changing the settings under Discussions in the individual post or page. (More on that below).
2. To stop all comments on all published posts (or pages):
Simply disallowing comments as mentioned above will not stop the flow of comments on existing posts and pages. To trash all comments on all existing posts visit your Dashboard > Comments.
Here, you can select the comments you want gone, click Bulk Actions, select “Move to Trash”, and then click the Apply button.
3. To stop comments on selected posts (or pages) in bulk:
This time let’s go to the All Posts section. Select all the posts for which you wish to delete comments. Then click on Bulk Actions > Edit > Apply. A new option Bulk Edit will open up where you can choose the Do Not Allow option for comments.
You’ll be restricted to selecting from 20 posts at a time because that’s the default setting for display of posts in the All Posts screen. To display a greater number on each screen, make changes under Screen Options.
4. To stop comments on existing posts individually:
Select the specific post from All Posts and click Edit Post. Below the writing area, you’ll see a heading Discussion. If you cannot see this option, enable “Discussion” under “Screen Options”. In the Discussion box, uncheck “Allow comments”.
You can also achieve the same result by opting to Quick Edit individual posts.
5. To disable comments on media files:
We’re still not done, as the posts may continue to receive comments on the media files.
When you upload an image to your post, an attachment file is created. This file will continue to receive comments, even if you’ve disabled them on the corresponding post. To disable comments in WordPress for those attachments, visit Media Library, select the media file and click on Edit.
You’ll find a “Discussion” box similar to to the one in the text editor for posts, and you can disable comments there.
It’s not possible to do a bulk edit for media files using settings in WordPress, but you can do this by adding some code to your theme file.
6. Besides disabling comments altogether, you can also get more control over comments by adjusting things in the Settings > Discussion panel. Let’s have a quick look through the options available:
- Requiring moderator to approve the comment before it is published: This not only catches bots and spam, but also helps to prevent a comment from appearing right away on the frontend of your site. It will appear on your dashboard in the comments queue where you’ll have to deal with it.
- Blacklisting IP addresses, usernames or emails: blacklist known offenders, and even a partial match to the list will be blocked. You can also add a bit of code to .htaccess to block known malicious IPs.
- Requiring the user to register: Can bring down both spam and the volume of comments.
- Approving comment authors: Save time by approving comment authors. Subsequent comments will pass through easily.
- Closing comments on older articles: Specify the number of days after which comments will be stopped. Spammers generally target older posts, so closing comments will cut down on spam.
- Limiting links: This can thwart spammers who like to leave as many links as possible with their comment.
- Be notified when you receive comments: If you keep yourself abreast with new comments, you can act swiftly on unwanted ones.
Disable Comments on a Specific Page or Post
By default, comments are turned off on all your pages.
However, WordPress gives you the freedom to enable or disable comments on individual pages and posts.
Simply head over to Pages » All Pages from the left sidebar. On the next page, you need to hover your mouse cursor over the title of a page that you want enable or disable comments and click the Edit link.
On the top-right corner of your page, you’ll see the 3 vertical dots icon. You need to click on it to open a dropdown menu and then click on Options.
This will open a popup box, and you need to make sure the Discussion box is enabled here.
Once you close this modal box, you’ll see the Discussion meta box on the right side of your editor. If you don’t see it, then please make sure that you click on the Document tab to view it.
Now, you can uncheck the Allow Comments box to disable comments on this page and click on Update to save the changes.
On the other hand, if you want to selectively enable comments, then you can just check the box to enable it for certain pages.
You can follow the same process for turning off comments on individual posts or other custom post types.
Disable Comments on Pages and Posts in Bulk
Want to disable comments on all your published posts and pages without doing it individually? You can do that without the use of a plugin.
First of all, go to Posts » All Posts to see all your articles.
Next, select all the posts, choose Edit from the Bulk Actions dropdown box, and click on Apply.
You’ll now be able to perform bulk actions including changing the author name and turning off comments for all the selected posts.
Select Do not allow from the comments dropdown box and click on Update. This will disable comments on all your selected posts.
You can follow the same process to turn off comments on your pages.
Plugin solutions for disabling comments
Setting the manual WordPress settings aside, you can also use plugins to make the job easier and give you a more “managed” control over comments, so to speak. Here’s the main player in this realm:
If you don’t want to disable comments manually, then you can use the Disable Comments plugin to do it with just a click.
It allows you to completely disable comments everywhere on your WordPress site. You can also disable them on specific post types like posts, pages, media, and others. It also removes the comment form and stops displaying existing comments.
First thing you need to do is install and activate the Disable Comments plugin.
After activating the plugin, head over to Settings » Disable Comments from the left sidebar of your admin panel.
Selecting the first option allows you to disable comments on your WordPress site. The plugin will also remove the comments menu item from your WordPress admin area.
Using the second option, you can selectively disable comments on your posts, pages, or media.
If you want to remove comments only from the media attachments, then you can select On certain post types radio button and then check the Media checkbox.
You can do the same if you only want to turn off comments on WordPress pages. Using the plugin is the easiest way to disable comments on WordPress pages.
When you’re done, simply click on the Save Changes to complete the process.
Remove “Comments Are Closed” in WordPress
If your WordPress theme is not checking the comment status properly, then it may still display the comment form, existing comments, or even show the “Comments are closed” message.
You can ask your theme developer to fix this because this is not a standard compliant approach.
Alternatively, you can also try fixing it yourself by following the instructions below.
First, connect to your WordPress site using FTP Client or the File Manager in your WordPress hosting control panel. Now navigate to your current theme folder which will be located in /wp-content/themes/ folder.
In your theme folder, you need to locate the file comments.php, right-click on that file, and rename it to comments_old.php.
Next, you need to right-click in the right panel of your FTP client and select Create new file option. And then, name your new file as comments.php and click the OK button.
This trick simply serves an empty comments template to your WordPress theme, so no comments or comment related messages will be shown.
If your WordPress theme does not have the comments.php file, then you need to ask your theme developer which file you need to edit.
By Victor C.