How to Disable Comments in WordPress – A Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners

Comments on the contents of your site can be a great way to promote and boost your SEO on search engines. Not only this but your viewer’s engagement can also improve with the open discussions on a monologue. With all these in mind, users simply would not want to part ways with their viewer’s valuable comments right? Wrong. With the increase in the internet community and one trying to out beat the others in line, sometimes, our comment sections are filled with spams and self-promotional comments. Not only this but, there is certainly no bars on hurtful comments that leave your viewers and audience the bad impression of your WordPress site. So, we are going to show you how to easily disable comments in WordPress.
While some of the popular networks like CNN and Reuters have come with a plan to leave their site alone in the comment section simply by taking it to the social platform, this simply isn’t the solution for all out there. There is also the option to create a forum to share thoughts and comments about a content that can build up user interaction. This will prevent not all but most comments that you want to keep away from your official site.
But the question remains if the situation comes when you want to fully disable comments in WordPress, what do you do? Don’t worry, because we are dealing with the exact topic today right here on our blog. If you are a beginner to WordPress, you might want to learn more about the basics of it. Here is our article covering all of the basics of WordPress for an easy start.
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How to Disable Comments in WordPress?
Usually, the comment section of your WordPress site is enabled by default on all of your contents and posts. However, you can change this setting and disable comments for either all of your posts or selective posts. You can also set this setting for future posts or the existing ones.
Disabling Comments on all Future posts
Start by logging on with your admin WordPress account and go to your Dashboard. Click on the option for Settings and then Discussion. You will see the option to post comments on new articles. Simply tick it off and the comments will be disabled for any new posts you post.
Deleting comments for All Posts
Although the above method stops the comment flow on any further posts, this does not remove all the existing comments on your existing post. For this, you need to disable or delete the comments that were already there.
To start login to your Admin WordPress account and go to Dashboard.
Click on the option for Comments. Once you are redirected to the new screen, you will see all of the comments. Select the ones you don’t want. On your top left-hand side, you will see a drop-down menu. Select Move to Trash from the menu and simply click Apply.
Easy as a piece of cake, you can remove all of the comments that you don’t want in a matter of minutes.
Disabling comments on a Specific post or Multiple Posts/ Pages
Method 1: Bulk Edit Options
To disable a comment on a specific post or multiple selected ones, you have the option to do so with the bulk action.
First, log in to your admin WordPress account and go to the All Post section. You will see the option for Bulk Action. Select Edit and then Apply. Make sure there is ‘check’ the specific posts you want to turn off comments on.
Then, you will be redirected to a new window where you can edit the setting for the comment. Select ‘Do not allow‘ to disable the comments and you are done.
This way you can disable comments for one or multiple selected WordPress posts.
Method 2: Quick Edit
Another way to disable comments on a specific single WordPress post or page is ‘Quick Edit’.
First, go to ‘All Posts‘ or ‘All Pages‘.
Locate the specific post or page you want to turnoff the comments and find ‘Quick Edit’ below the post/ page title.
Now, you will see editing options like below. Make sure there is no check on ‘Allow Comments’ and ‘Allow Pings’.
This way, you can stop commenting/ discussion feature on your WordPress posts and pages.
Plugins to Disable Comments in WordPress
Other than the techniques above, you can also skip the process and use the help of plugins to help disable comments. Here we have some examples of plugins that you can use for this purpose.
1. Disable Comments
This is one of the best and easiest tools to use if you wish to either delete all comments or selected ones on your page or websites. Developed by WPZest, you can download this from the official website of WordPress. As you can see the widget in use above in the image, it is so simple to use it;s functions.
Features:
- Easy Enable or Disable comment option
- Option to disable comment globally or on certain pages.
- Option to disable comment on certain pages or posts only.
2. No Page Comments
Another great WordPress widget to disable comments in WordPress, this plugin comes with all the functionality for ease of use and purposefulness. This plugin is brought to you by Seth Alling and you can easily download and install it from the official WordPress website.
Features:
- Option to easily disable comments and enable it on one click.
- Option to disable comments on existing posts, page and media.
- Ease to disable comments on future contents.
3. Disable WooCommerce Reviews
If you own a shopping website then this plugin might just be the one for you! Tired of fake product reviews as well as self-promoting comments and scams all over your website? Just download and install this WordPress widget and get rid of all those for good. Simple to use and efficient, you can download this plugin directly from the WordPress site.
Features:
- Removes all the Review tabs from your product page.
- Works for all types of product and is a super light plugin of 3KB.
- Can be changed and enabled at any time with ease.
Wrapping Up!
Although comments can be a handful if they contain spams and hurtful comments, we have mentioned methods that will help you manage them. Whether you decide to remove certain or all comments, it is in your hands. So go ahead, make your websites more friendly and efficient for your users by removing unwanted spams and review. This will also help boost your traffic and filter negative reviews and comments making your site more useful.
With our thorough step-by-step tutorial, we hope you know how to disable comments in WordPress sites. If you still have any queries, do let us know through the comment section down below.