Disable Comments Globally in Wordpress

How to completely disable comments in wordpress

The inbuilt commenting system in Wordpress can be great for receiving feedback from your readers. However, in some cases, you might want to disable it. Apart from spam, there are more reasons one may need to disable the Wordpress comments.

The settings to manage comments in a Wordpress blog are included in the Wordpress settings under discussion settings. There are a few other methods also to disable comments in Wordpress posts including all posts or specific posts.

If you are constantly bothered by spam comments and instead of wanting to deal with spam, want to disable comments sitewide, you can do that easily using a plugin.

Disable comments from Wordpress discussion settings:

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As already mentioned, the comments on your Wordpress blog can be easily managed from the discussion settings. Using the discussion settings, you can disable comments on new posts. Please go to the discussion settings included in Wordpress settings and uncheck the box labeled allow people to post comments on new posts in the default post settings. The changes made under the default post settings are applied only to the new posts. If you want you can override these settings from individual posts. The settings to disable comments on individual posts can be found in the sidebar at the bottom under the label discussion.

Using the above method you can disable comments on new posts. However, your older posts may still have to deal with comments and spam. To disable comments on those posts as well, move on to comment settings under the discussion settings. Here you will see a box labeled ‘Automatically close comments on posts older than xx days. Change the value for the number of days from the default value of 14 days to 0 days.

If a user tries to leave a comment on any post on your wordpress blog, he will see the notice that comments are closed. The comments that have been approved will remain visible under your posts.

Disable comments on individual posts:

Comments can also be disabled in Wordpress on individual posts. If you do not want to disable comments on all posts, but only want specific posts to have comments disabled, you can find these settings inside the post editor.

To disable comments on specific posts, go to the desired post and open it for editing. In the right sidebar in the post editor, scroll to the bottom and expand the discussion settings. Uncheck the box next to allow comments. This will disable comments on that specific post. Right below it you will find the box for allowing pingbacks and trackbacks and you can disable that one too.

In this way, you can easily disable comments for specific posts.

Disable comments sitewide using a plugin:

There are also some plugins that can help you disable comments sitewide with ease. You can disable comments on new posts as well as old posts, which means you can also hide existing comments from public view. There are a few really good plugins to accomplish this task.

Disable Comments with the Disable Comments Plugin:

The ‘disable comments plugin by WPdeveloper’ is an excellent plugin to disable comments sitewide. This plugin has excellent settings for disabling comments or disabling comments on specific post types only like posts or static pages.

This plugin includes the features to disable as well as delete comments sitewide. You can install the plugin from the Wordpress plugin repository. Activate the plugin and configure it. If you want to completely disable comments everywhere, then just check the box next to everywhere under disable comments settings. If you want to disable comments only on specific post types like static pages, you can check the box next to that post type.

The same plugin includes the settings to delete comments from your site. If you completely want to get rid of comments on your site, you can delete all the comments on your existing posts or pages. Just check the box next to everywhere under delete comments settings. The plugin can also help you get rid of Spam comments in bulk. You can select the comment types that you want to delete and delete them all in bulk.

Disable comments using Perfmatters premium plugin:

Perfmatters is an excellent lightweight plugin that can help you get rid of unnecessary scripts and features in Wordpress and make your Wordpress installation safer and faster. The plugin makes it possible to switch these features off by just toggling a button.

Perfmatters is a premium plugin and you will need to buy a subscription to use it. Once you have bought a subscription, you can download the plugin and then upload it to wordpress from where you add new plugins.

Once you have uploaded the plugin, its settings can be changed from the Wordpress settings -> Perfmatters. Click on general settings and toggle the button next to disable comments and disable comment urls. This will disable comments globally and remove comment urls from Wordpress.

Perfmatters tries to accomplish the following tasks when you disable comments :-

• Disable the built-in Recent Comments widget.

• Remove the X-Pingback header.

• Remove the comment feed links.

• Disable comment feed requests.

• Remove comment links from the admin bar.

• Remove support for comments from all post types.

• Close comment filters.

• Remove comment links from the admin menu.

• Disable the built-in discussion page.

• Hide comments from the dashboard.

• Hide comment settings option from the profile page.

• Return a blank comments template when requested.

• Remove comment reply script.

In this way, you can completely get rid of comments on your website/blog using the Perfmatters plugin.