How to Disable Comments in WordPress? (A step by step guide)

If you are a small business owner, you might want to disable comments in WordPress. Mainly because reviews can often be self-promotional, spam, and sometimes in a hurry. What’s more, regular reviews can eat your production time.

But it is also true that a post without comments seems incomplete, so many sites open their hands for feedback.

Why disable comments in WordPress?

Some websites, especially newspapers such as CNN and Reuters, receive a lot of criticism. They have solved the problem of spam by transferring comments to social platforms. This can also be in your favor in many ways:

it will remove controversial comments from your blog and will not directly affect you. In addition, social networks are somewhat self-regulated and can reduce inappropriate comments on their own.

Let’s not forget that each comment requires another database query/request, which only takes time and space. If your site is getting a lot of feedback, it’s also a good idea to start a forum to improve the interaction between readers.

Disable comments in WordPress using standard panel settings

You can disable comments in WordPress on the whole website, or selectively on certain posts and pages. You can also adjust comments using the settings page options in many ways.

The place to start managing comments is in WordPress Panel Settings > Discussion.

Stop comments on all future posts (and pages):

• Uncheck the “Allow people to comment on items” option. You can also turn off ping and tracking here.
• This will completely stop commenting and ping all future posts on your site. (The page is disabled by default.)
• Disable comments on future posts in WordPress If you want to allow comments on individual posts or articles, you can do so by changing settings in individual posts or page discussions.

Stop all comments on all published posts (or pages):

• Just not allowing comments mentioned above will not stop the flow of comments on existing posts and pages.
• Trash Access your panel > Comments for all existing posts.
• Here you can select the comment you want to go, click Block Actions, select “Move to Trash” and click the Apply button.

Stop bulk comments for selected posts (or pages):

• Select all posts for which you want to delete comments. Then click Bulk Action > Edit > Apply.
• A new option for bulk editing opens and you can select the comment option that is not allowed.
• You will be limited to selecting from 20 posts at a time because this is the default setting for displaying posts on all post screens.
• To display a larger number on each screen, change it in Display Options.

Stop comments on existing posts separately:

• Select a specific publication from all publications and click Edit Publication.
• In the writing area, you will see a headline discussion.
• If you do not see this option, enable Discussion in Display Options. In the discussion box, clear Allow comments.
• You can also get the same result by choosing to quickly edit individual posts.

Disable comments for media files:

• We’re not finished yet, as posts may still receive feedback about media files.
• This file will continue to receive comments even if you have disabled them in the corresponding posts.
• Disable WordPress comments, these attachments, access the media library, select media files, and click Edit.
• You will find a “discussion” box similar to the post text editor where you can disable comments.
• It is not possible to edit bulk media files using the settings in WordPress, but you can do so by adding some code to your theme file.

In addition to completely disabling comments, you can also get more feedback control by adjusting the content in Settings > Discussion Board.

• Require moderators to approve reviews before they are posted – this not only captures bots and spam but also helps prevent comments from appearing immediately on the front of your site. It will appear in your dashboard’s comment queue and you’ll have to deal with it.
• IP address, username, or email in the blacklist:
• The blacklist of known criminals will be blocked, or even a partial match to that list. You can also add some code to.htaccess to block known malicious IP addresses.
• Require user registration: can reduce the amount of spam and comments.
• Approve Review Authors — Saves time by approving Review Authors. Subsequent comments will be easy to approve.
• Last comment on the previous article: Specify the number of days the comment will stop. Spammers tend to target older posts, so closing comments will reduce spam.
• Limit links: This can block spammers who like to leave as many links with their comments.
• Notify when you receive a review: If you are always aware of a new review, you can quickly take action on reviews you don’t need.

Plug-in solution for Disabling comments in WordPress

Manually set the WordPress settings aside, you can also use the plugin to make the job easier and give you a more “managed” control comment, so to speak.

Disable Comments

The Disable comments plug-in may stop commenting on the entire site, even across the network on multiple sites.

Very clean plugin if you do not want any comments on your site. A “set it up, forget it” solution. Other good plugins to handle spam comments are rude WP or Akismet.

Conclusion

Smaller sites can simply control comments by adjusting WordPress settings or using a simple plugin. Heavy-content sites typically choose options such as Disqus or other similar third-party solutions.