Disable comments in WordPress – How to guide

My beginner’s guide shows you step by step how to disable comments in WordPress. You can disable them for all your posts or you can disable them for individual posts. The process is a few clicks in your WordPress admin.

Let’s get started.

• Disabling comments for all your future posts
• How to disable comments for individual posts
• How to disable comments for all published posts
• Video tutorial on disabling comments on WordPress
• Conclusion

Disabling comments for all your future posts

To start, we find ‘Settings’ in our WordPress admin menu, in the popup select ‘Discussion’.

Like this.

Now we come to this page. On this page, we want to uncheck the ‘Allow people to post comments on new articles’ box. At the moment, I have a tick in the box, that means visitors can comment on my posts.

By unticking this box and selecting ‘Save changes’ at the bottom of the screen, the comments box will be removed on any new posts I publish. 

Don’t forget to save your changes after you untick this box. The ‘Save changes’ link is at the bottom of the page.

How to disable comments for individual posts

If you are writing a post and don’t want to enable comments for that article, there is an option for that.

There is a drop-down menu called ‘Discussion’ on the right-hand side of the post you are editing.

When we open that menu we get these options.

The is an option to ‘Allow comments’ and ‘Allow pingbacks and trackbacks’. To disable comments for this post, we untick the box next to ‘Allow Comments’. When we publish or update this post, the comments will be disabled.

Pingbacks and Trackbacks are messages sent between two posts or pages that have links to each other.

That is how you disable comments in WordPress.

How to disable comments for all published posts

If you want to disable comments on all your published posts, you can do that with a couple of clicks.

First, we select ‘All Posts’ from our WordPress admin dashboard.

Like this.

After you select ‘All Posts’, all your current posts are listed. To disable comments for all the posts on the list, you first tick the box at the top, to select all posts.

Like this.

Next, click on the ‘Bulk Actions’ drop-down menu, and select ‘Edit’ and click on ‘Apply’.

On the next screen, open the ‘Comments’ drop-down menu, and select ‘Do not allow’. Then click on ‘Update’ to save your changes.

Like this.

Now all comments are disabled for the posts on your list. If you would like to allow comments for some of your posts. You can do that as a bulk edit, or you can go into each post and change the comments settings there.

Don’t forget to select ‘Update’ after you have made your changes.

Video tutorial on disabling comments on WordPress

Conclusion

I think it is a good idea to have comments activated for your site, it gives you a channel to communicate with your visitors. It also helps boost your word count on Google.

If you offer advice and help to your visitors, they will start to trust you and will be more likely to purchase the products you recommend.

Sometimes it is necessary to disable comments due to the nature of the blog topic. In that case, you can use the option to disable comments for individual posts.

To control spam, install the ‘Askimet’ plugin. This plugin helps monitor your comments, any comment it believes is spam, it will put the comment in a spam folder for you to look at when you have time.

You install this plugin from the WordPress plugin library in your WordPress admin or from WordPress.org.

If you would like more tutorials on using WordPress, please go to my WordPress category. I also have a YouTube channel with WordPress tutorials.

Comments

Do you disable comments on your blog posts?

If you have any questions please ask them in the comments box below, I reply to everyone.

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