How to Disable Comments in WordPress – 3 Easy Steps

Comments on blog posts can be a good thing. They essentially increase your content length, which is Google in the eyes of Google. Why would we want to disable comments in WordPress?

We only want comments if they add value to the article topic and are relevant. Spam and irrelevant text will only dilute the page’s topic and keyword ratio.

The Commentluv commenting system on WordPress blogs is widely used to generate backlinks from a website’s blog post. The comment, if approved provides a link to the posters own website via a profile name link. This can be beneficial for SEO, if done in the correct way. Many people use tools such as Scrapebox to post hundreds of generic comments to blog posts, in the hope that a percentage will be automatically approved, and a few backlinks are created. Not a great strategy for quality backlinks.

Even blogs that are reasonably new will start to comments by the bucketload, with no relevance to the article. Usually promoting some shopping website, another blog, or some medication!

So, after weighing up the pros and cons, you may have concluded that it’s best to disable comments in WordPress.

Let’s take a look at how we go about doing this.

How to Disable Comments in WordPress

As a default setting, WordPress enables comments on posts, and disables them on pages.

These settings can be easily changed in the WordPress dashboard settings. Here’s how:

1. Head to ‘settings’, then ‘discussion’

2. Take a look at the WordPress settings

3. Here to can see the WordPress settings for posts. If you want to simply disable all comment, just untick the ‘allow people to submit comments on new posts’ option. 

Alternatively, to allow them but manually approve posts, ensure the ‘comment must be manually approved’ option is ticked.

Remember to click ‘save changes’ at the bottom of the page before exiting.

Removing comments from published posts

While the above method will disable future comments on posts, this will not affect comments on current posts.

Here’s how to remove comments that are published, or pending approval:

Head to ‘Comments’ in the WordPress menu

You’ll see here that I have no comments on my posts on this particular website.

But plenty of spam comments. These have been placed in spam by marking them as spam on the ‘all’ page. From here you can see you have the option to reinstate them ‘not spam’ or ‘delete permanently’.

Stopping comments on specific posts

There may be a time when you need to disable, or enable comments on specific published posts. Here’s how to do it:

Head to ‘posts’ in the WordPress menu.

From the ‘all’ posts list, tick the posts you want to allow or disable comments for. Click ‘edit’ from the left dropdown menu and ‘apply’.

You’ll see your selected posts on the left and the comment option over on the right. From here, just select ‘allow’ or ‘do not allow’. Remember to click ‘update’ before exiting.

Conclusion

We’ve shown you how to disable comments in WordPress on new posts, published posts and specific posts. It’s a straightforward process and may be the answer if you’re receiving loads of irrelevant comments on your blog.

Personally I allow comments, but moderate them manually. This way, I can accept any genuine comments which add value to my posts.