Disabling Comments in WordPress

WordPress is one of the largest blogging platforms in the world, and rightly so. It’s easy to install, easy to use, and it’s actually setup pretty well right out of the box. However, like almost every software ever (especially open source) it has its little quirks that you have to get used to. One of those quirks is how the commenting is setup when you first start using WordPress, so let’s walk through how to manage whether or not you are allowing comments.

Disabling Comments on All Posts: The Easy Way
discussion-tabThe easiest way to disable comments on all posts is to simply go to Discussion under Settings in the WordPress backend.

Once you’re there you’ll see the Discussion Settings menu, which get’s down to some pretty specific stuff but we’re only worried about the bit at the top. You’ll see an option for “Allow people top post comments on new articles.” If you’ll click that so it’s unchecked, it will disable comments on all articles that you post in the future.

 

Now that you have disabled comments for all of your future posts, you’ll probably want to disable them for all of the posts you already have. The easiest way to do is to simply go to your posts page. Once you’fe there, first you need to select all of your posts. You can do this by clicking the checkbox next to the “Title” header at the top of the page.

Select All Posts

Once you have all of your posts created the next step is to bulk edit all of them. To do this, while you have all of your posts checked you need to select “Edit” from the top “Bulk Actions” dropdown. Once you’ve selected “Edit”, just click the “Apply” button next to it.

select-editOnce you’ve brought up the Bulk Edit screen, you’ll be presented with another handful of options. The one you need to be worried about is the Comments dropdown. If you’ll just click that and set it to “Do not allow” and then click “Submit” in the lower right hand corner, it will set all of your posts so that the comments are closed.

change-to-do-not-allowNow that you’ve changed those two little settings, you’ve disabled comments for any posts you write in the future, as well as for all of the posts that you have already written. If you have any questions about how to disable comments on your WordPress blog, please use (ironically enough) the WordPress comments below to ask anything you want and we’ll get back to you with an answer as soon as possible.


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Ramapo College Adjunct Assistant Professor Najlah Hicks