How to Disable WordPress Default Comments?

by Vipe Team in WordPress Development; Published on 02.04.2020 Last updated on 02.07.2021

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While it’s common knowledge that the WordPress comments feature can be a godsend, driving up engagement and getting you live feedback, it’s also obvious that not every website needs the comments system.
In fact, getting rid of the comments if you don’t need the feature also helps reduce spam and makes your website load faster. Let’s look at more good reasons for ditching the comments feature, and three ways to go about it.

Why Chuck the Comments Feature?

WordPress was intended to be, and still retains the behaviors of, a blogging service. So, it’s no surprise that WordPress has a pretty full-fledged comments system. Understandably, it is disabled by default for static pages and enabled on post content – as timely content like news articles and up-to-date posts would benefit from comments.

But sometimes, we use the post option creatively, and comments are no longer necessary. We can create, for instance, product pages. In other cases, we’re trying to run a professional web establishment, and comments could detract from that regardless of the type of content.

Perhaps we even want to nudge the audience to air their concerns and compliments to use a forum specifically designed for that purpose. There’s also the looming specter of spam comments and all the baggage that they bring. And, as I mentioned before, your pages will fly just a bit lighter over the interwebs when they shed that comment weight.

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Obviously, your website is your own baby, and your target audience will have unique needs and peculiarities. So, for whatever reason, or because I’ve convinced you to, once you’ve decided to disable comments, here are three ways to get it done:

Default WordPress Options to Disable Comments

This is a simple and straightforward way. If all you need is to nuke the comments feature, this is your best bet. Of course, it comes with a few restrictions. You can take one of two approaches to this.

The Per-Post (or Page) option

Open the WordPress page or post you intend to tackle, and on the sidebar to the right, you’ll see the heading ‘Discussion’. Open the section, and uncheck ‘Allow Comments’. Save or update the page, and voila! Visitors can no longer comment on it. However, no existing comments will be affected, and you’ll have to manually locate and delete them.

Global Disabling option

Let’s also assume that you now want clear comment options from the whole site. Go to Settings, and find ‘Discussion’. Under that option, again, look for ‘Allow Comments’ and uncheck the option. Like before, any existing comments will have to be manually deleted, of course. And here’s the other tricky part, this only applies to new posts, so all your existing pages and posts with comments enables will stay that way. To fix this, scroll to find the ‘Automatically close comments on articles older than x days’ setting, enable it and make it 0 days. Together, these two settings will globally disable the comments feature.

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WordPress Plugins to Disable Comments

While it’s satisfying to use a few quick settings to rid yourself of the comments system, tough luck if you wanted more control in how you went about it. If you’re in the market for something neat and quick, I’d suggest the Disable Comments plugin. You can use it to disable comments either site-wide or for some kinds of posts only. Navigate to Settings, and then Disable Comments, to find the options it adds. Click on Save Changes when you’re done picking your options, and then even the native WordPress comments options can’t override the plugin.