A quick guide on how to deactivate the comments function
The built-in comment feature in WordPress is fantastic to get in touch with your visitors and receive valuable feedback from your readers or start active discussions. However, depending on the type of your website, you may want to disable comments in WordPress. The reason could be that the comment feature just isn’t suitable for your website or because you’re receiving a lot of comment spam. In this tutorial you’ll learn how to disable comments on your WordPress website or blog.
- Disabling comments on your WordPress website
- Deactivate comments for published posts
- Globally disable comments with WordPress plugins
Disabling comments on your WordPress website
By default, comments for posts are globally enabled in WordPress. If you want to completely deactivate the comment feature in WordPress, this can be quite a challenge because the available option to deactivate comments will only take effect for new posts. That means the comment feature for posts that already have been published before the change will still be active.
To disable comments for new posts on your WordPress website, please navigate to Settings => Discussion in your WordPress dashboard and uncheck the particular checkbox for comments. Keep in mind what has been said before, this setting however does not apply to already published posts.
After you’ve disabled comments for new posts in WordPress, you may want to get rid of the comment feature for already published posts as well. This usually is the case if you don’t make use of comments on your WordPress website. Another possible scenario is that you may want to end a discussion on a certian topic or you’re getting lots of spam comments for particular posts.
To turn off comments for single posts in WordPress, please navigate to Posts in your WordPress dashboard, find the post you want to disable the comments for and use the Quick Edit function to do so. You can see this in detail when having a look at the video in the previous section of this guide.