Introduction
Comments are very important for a WordPress site. They provide a way to visitors to interact with the owners or moderators of a site. They allow visitors to give their opinions, feedback, and maybe even friendly remarks. However, there may be instances in which we would like to disable comments on parts or maybe even the whole site. These may be because the comments are self-promotional, spam, or even trolling. Comments also add to the loading time of websites so, disabling them to make your site load faster is another valid reason. The most important thing, however, is that permitting or restricting comments is very important. Thankfully, it’s very easy to do this, and we’re going to learn how in this tutorial.
In this tutorial, we will be learning how to disable the comments on a WordPress site for both individual posts and even the whole WordPress site.
Manually Disabling Comments
You don’t really need a plugin to disable comments on your WordPress site since it can be done manually. Let’s take a look at how!
Disabling Comments on Posts and Pages
We can disable comments on individual posts and pages.
To do that, we have to edit it through he block editor. Here’s how to do it with a post. From the admin dashboard, go to the “Posts” page. Once there, click on the “Edit” link for the post.
Once there, uncheck the ‘Allow comments’ checkbox to disable the comments.
We can also do the same thing through the ‘Quick Edit’ option.
The same method works for pages.
Disabling Comments by Bulk Actions
The comments can also be disabled by bulk actions. To do this, navigate to the “Posts” pages from the admin dashboard. Once there, click on the checkboxes of the posts you will be disabling comments on. After that, choose the “Edit” item from the dropdown menu.
Look for the “Comments” dropdown, then choose the “Do Not Allow” option.
None should be able to comment on the post. Pages can also be bulk edited in the same way.
Disabling Comments on Future Posts
The previous methods will disable comments on existing posts/pages however, it will be useful to disable comments as well for future posts/pages. Thankfully, this is easy to configure.
From the admin dashboard, hover over “Settings” then click on the “Discussion” menu item.
This will redirect to the “Discussion Settings” page. Once there, uncheck the box that enables visitors to post comments.
After doing this, visitors will no longer be able to comment on any post/page.
Deleting Comments (Optional)
There are cases when you may also want to delete all the comments on all posts/pages from your site. This is also really easy to do.
From the admin dashboard, click on the “Comments” menu item. This should redirect to the “Comments” page. Once there, hover over the comment that you need to delete. Click the “Trash” link after.
Alternatively, we can also click on the the checkbox beside the “Author” header then apply the “Move to Trash” bulk action.
Using a Plugin to Disable Comments
In case you would prefer not to disable comments manually, you can use a plugin to do that for you – the Disable Comments plugin. This plugin is free and can be downloaded from the “Add Plugins” page in the WordPress admin dashboard. Install and activate it after searching for it.
Once that is done, configure the plugin by hovering over “Settings” then clicking on the “Disable Comments” link.
After doing that, you will be redirected to the plugin’s settings page. From there you can configure where comments should be disabled.
Conclusion
We now have learned how to disable the comments on a WordPress site. We’ve seen how easy it is to do. We have learned how we can do it manually, and we’ve also learned how to do it with a plugin. Now you can start to disable and enable comments on your WordPress site as you need to.
Thank You for reading this tutorial. We hope you learned from it.
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