Disable Comments in WordPress in Simple Steps

As a website administrator or website owner you actually want to retain absolute control on the comments section whether it is related to comments enabling or comments disabling. However in this article, our focus is on disable comments in WordPress in Simple Steps.

So in WordPress actually, there are two methods by which you can disable comments. We will explore each of these methods so that you have the exact know-how of disabling Comments in WordPress. The important thing here is the fact that both of these methods are easy to use. One method is to disable Comments globally by using the plugin and in the other method, comments are disabled for future posts and pages.

First we discuss how you can enable/disable comments on future posts and pages. Actually, you can disable comments on future posts by going into your Discussion settings. Firstly, if you have more than one site, then you have to go to the My Sites section.

Here you have to select sites for which you want to disable comments. Then you have to go to the Settings section. Here you have you click on the Discussion tab. Under the “default article sections” check or uncheck the box next to the option titled as “Allow people to post comments on new articles”. Finally, click on the “Save Settings” button. This disables comments for future posts and pages.

You have another option that is to turn off comments automatically after a specific number of days. To do this, go to page Settings -> Discussion and look for “other comment settings” section. Here check the option specified such as “Automatically close comments on articles older than (specify days) days”.

So this completes the settings related to comments on pages and posts that have been already published.

Now, there is another way by which comments can be disabled globally on any post type. The plugin is titled Disable Comments. With this plugin, administrators can globally disable comments on any post type. Comments can be disabled, comments can be disabled according to post type.

Moreover, on multisite installations, it disables comments on the entire network. Here, one thing needs to understand and that is the fact that is extremely difficult to disable comments globally in WordPress.

As, it has already been established, that all future comments can be turned off easily. However, past posts comments kept that status meaning people can still be able to post comments on such posts, pages. The plugin “Disable Comments” can easily turn off comments globally. This is a free download plugin which is available at the wordpress.org. Using this plugin, comments can be disabled globally or specific post types.

So we see that Comments are very crucial and you definitely want to use them for your advantage. So, when to block comments for specific posts types or comments globally, it depends upon your strategy related with SEO and SMO as Google algorithms and updates keep on changing. Thus, you should keep pace with these changing. So basically, we find that disabling comments in WordPress is necessary and we can disable comments in WordPress by various methods for specific post types or comments globally.