How to Disable Comments on WordPress? – Easy Step Guide

WordPress gives you the ability to create websites on the go, there are times when you don’t want to include comments on your website. how to Disable Comments for your WordPress website? while comments are the best way to reach out to your audience, you can turn them off for specific cases such as contacting us, privacy policies, and disclaimers.

How to Disable Comments for WordPress?

In this article, I’m going to show you. how to Disable Comments for your WordPress website. we’re going to cover several different methods where we’re going to remove comments disable comments not even allow comments to even get on your WordPress website and then at the end if you really kind of want comments.

Disable Comments on new posts

let’s get going the first thing you want to do is head over to your WordPress dashboard because we’ll make some setting changes so the first one we want to do is let’s go to our settings area discussion.

This is where we can change some of the discussion settings so under discussion settings under default article settings

we want to uncheck allow people to post comments on new articles and that will help for any articles or any blog posts that are published on this site the comments section will not be turned on so once we’re done with that we can just scroll all the way down.

Then Save Changes and so now comments will be closed on all of my posts but when you turn this off for all future ones it doesn’t do anything to the comments that have already been creative so you have to go in and change that separately

Disable Comments on a Specific Page

so I’ll show you how you can do that pages and posts both have this area that you can make changes. I’m going to show you how you do this under a page go to all pages and by default pages comments are turned off for them so if you do see comments on your pages this is what you need to do.

Go to all pages select the page that you want to work on and you should see this discussion tab here under document make sure that you’re not under a block make sure you’re under document and make sure you can see this if you can’t see this discussion tab go up to the three dots here.

Go down to options and want to make sure that the discussion panel is clicked and so now once that’s clicked we should be able to see a discussions tab here that we can expand and we’ll allow comments or disallow comments, so I’m going to turn comments off for this page and that’s an individual setting change

Disable Comments on multiples Page

if you want to do multiples at a time well you can go into all posts and what you can do is highlight all of your posts so click on the check mark next to title and that will select all of the posts on your page.

we’ll want to go to bulk actions will click Edit click apply and it’ll bring up a screen where we can make changes to all of the posts that are selected under comments we want to hit no do not allow.

Then let’s update that by clicking the Update button and now all of the comments will be not allowed for a future now you see over here we still have a comment so I’ll show you how you can do that as well so making comments not allowable means that nobody in the future will be able to make comments on these posts.

Delete All WordPress Comments

if you have comments already on your site then you’ll want to go to comments and you’ll have to delete all of them you can either select each one individually or if you have several dozens or hundreds of them simply do the same thing.

Where you click on the check mark next to the author column and that will select all of the comments on the page.

Where you can go in and do bulk action of moving them to trash and then click apply and then they’ll all be sent over to trash.

Permanently Delete Comments On Trash

Where you can then click on the trash button select all again and permanently delete if you want to so that’s a quick way to get rid of all comments that are already there now a quick thing on this.

If you have several dozen or several hundred it can get a little tedious to keep having to go through each one by one but what you can do is under screen option sunder pagination you can choose how many number of items are on the page so you can if you have hundreds and hundreds of them go ahead and type in the number that you want and that will pull in that many on the page so you don’t have to keep doing this next and next and next so that will turn off all on previous posts that will remove all comments on previous posts and we’ve also disabled comments on future posts or pages there are some times

Disable Comments on Media Files
when comments are turned on media the media page I think if I look view the attachment page you see there’s a way that people can leave a comment for the attachment of the media and if you want to turn that off then there’s a little bit of code you’re actually going to have to do if you’re nervous about adding code don’t worry. I’ll show you away that you can do it without code it’ll be using a plug-in if you wanted to do it without a plugin then you’ll want to be a little comfortable with adjusting your theme so we’ll want to go appearance theme editor and for bulk editing, just copy and paste the following code into your functions.php file.

function filter_media_comment_status( $open, $post_id ) {
    $post = get_post( $post_id );
    if( $post->post_type == 'attachment' ) {
        return false;
    }
    return $open;
}
add_filter( 'comments_open', 'filter_media_comment_status', 10 , 2 );

you want to go into your theme area over on the right you’re looking for your functions that PHP page so I’ll click on that.

I’ll scroll all the way down I’ll start a new line and I’m going to paste in this bit of code and what this is is to filter the comment status and again check in the description below so you can find this bit of code from our article on our website so once you do that well click update file and then when you go to your library and you go to your attachment page I scroll down I don’t have that comment area anymore now

Disable Comments on Media Files With Plugin

if that made you bit nervous and you don’t want to do that don’t worry. I’ll show you a different way that you can do that using a plug-in and the plug-in is actually pretty good. It’ll handle a few other things as well as the media I’m going to go back into my appearance and remove that all right.

We’ll go to plugins well add new and we’re searching for a plug-in called disable comments by Samir Shah this is the one we want so let’s go ahead and install that once you install it you also want to hang around to make sure that you activate it as well and then you’ll have an area you can either click Settings here or if you ever have to come back to this go to settings disable comments to deal with the plugin so from here.

You can either choose to disable comments everywhere and that’ll remove it from everything no worries if you want comments on certain areas then you can choose to simply disable the comments say on your media here and then that would remove that as well and so those are several different techniques that you can use to disable turn off and remove comments from your website.