Comments are a native feature of WordPress as its blogging platform and comments can really spark up the life of the website. However, sometimes you just want to disable the comments per posts and globally.
If you are using WordPress as CMS and you want to remove or disable the comments entirely on pages or posts, there are a couple of ways to do it.
Disabling Comments in WordPress
You can install a plugin that will completely disable comments on all posts and pages. In order to do so, login to your WordPress website back-end. Then navigate inside WordPress admin -> Plugins -> Add new. Once you open up this page, just look for the search form on the right side of the screen. Type “Disable comments” into the search form and hit enter and wait for the list to compile.
Then just select that plugin from the list and click install and then click activate once it’s installed. See image:
Once you install this plugin, continue to its setting page located in WordPress admin -> Settings -> Disable comments. Here you can choose to disable comments site-wide or choose to remove them from specific places like posts, pages, or media. So, just choose the desired option and hit Save changes and comments will be removed from the website front end.
Deleting comments (not just disabling/removing)
If you on the other hand want to delete all comments besides removing them from the appearance, you can do that too using this same plugin. Just head to WordPress admin -> Tools -> Delete comments.
Remove comments in WordPress manually
If you for some reason don’t want to install plugin to do this dirty task, you could remove them manually, but its lot more work to do.
The first thing you need to do is to disable new discussion or comments inside WordPress admin -> Setting -> Discussion. Here just uncheck the option “Allow people to post comments on new articles” in order to prevent adding new comments. However, this will not disable or remove previously entered comments for active posts.
So, now we need to disable comments per posts basis and you need to open up each posts manually in order to make them gone from the particular post. So, open up some of the posts with comments for editing. Once you are on the editor page, click on the Screen option button located in top right corner of your page and the modal box with option will show right after. Here you just need to activate the section “Discussion”. See image:
Now, just scroll down below the main page editor and find the Discussion section. It should contain two options, the one to disable comments from appearing and the other for disabling pingbacks. See image:
Uncheck both options and save changes to your post.
The comments will be removed from appears but hey will still be saved in the database if you change your mind in the future.
Please note that you need to repeat this action for all posts and that’s why the plugin is very useful for this kind of action.
Conclusion
Well, it’s up to yours. If you decide to remove them from appearing you can do that manually or using the plugin, but the plugin will also offer the option to quickly disable comments across the entire website and there is even the option of deleting the comments for good.
I hope this article helps you with the comments disabling and stuff and I’m inviting you to share your impression or give any kind of feedback in the comments section below.
