How to Disable Comments in WordPress Posts and Pages

At this month’s Metro Detroit WordPress meetup, we held our quarterly Q & A session where members can ask questions and get help with their WordPress sites.

One of our members who recently started working with WordPress asked:

How do I disable comments in WordPress? I don’t remember turning them on. Why are they showing up on my site?

We answered his last question quickly. In WordPress, comments are turned on by default on pages and posts.

But we needed more information to better understand his issue, so we asked a few more questions:

• Do you have a lot of posts and pages, or just a few?
• Did you want to disable comments on pages, posts, or both?
• If you already have comments on your site, do you want to display them, hide them, or remove them?

He replied he had a few pages with no comments, so we explained what steps he could take to manage comments on his site. He was happy to learn it didn’t require a lot of work.

As different experts shared their recommendations, we discovered multiple ways to turn off comments in WordPress, depending on the requirements. Here are the options we shared.

Use Settings to Disable Comments

You can turn off comments for your entire site by going to Settings > Discussion.

In the Default Article Settings section, disable the Allow people to post comments on new articles checkbox.

Note you can still enable comments for individual posts or pages.

Use this option for sites that are currently under development, or if you only want to disable comments for new posts or pages.

Disable Comments with Screen Options

Another option for turning off comments is to use Screen Options.

For each individual post or pages, select the Screen Options tab found at the top of the Dashboard, under your login name. Look for Discussions and check the checkbox.

In the editing section, look for the Discussions meta box. Uncheck the Allow comments and Allow trackbacks and pingbacks.

Use this option if you only have a few posts or pages. But if you have a lot of pages/posts or have existing comments on pages/posts, you’ll want to look at the next few options.

Turn Off Comments with Bulk Actions

Depending on how many posts or pages your site has, you can disable comments using Bulk Actions.

From the All Pages or All Posts page, select the pages or posts you want comments turned off. In Bulk Edits choose Edit and select Apply.

On the page that displays, in the Comments section, choose Do not allow, and select Update.

Use this option to update 20 posts/pages at a time.

Disable Comments with the No Page Comment Plugin

An easy way to disable comments is the free No Page Comment plugin. Once activated, the plugin allows you to disable comments and pingbacks for posts, pages, and/or media sitewide.

One nice feature of the plugin is the ability to enable comments on individual posts, pages, or media using Screen Options. You can also disable comments/pingbacks on custom post types.

Use this option when you want more flexibility for disabling comments on posts, pages, and media.

Turn Off Comments Sitewide with the Disable Comments Plugin

I left this option for last since it has the most control over comments on your site. The Disable Comments plugin allows you to disable comments for any type of post on your site.

Once you’ve disabled comments sitewide, the settings can’t be overridden for individual posts.

If you use the plugin on a multisite installation, you can disable comments for the entire network.

Use this option if you don’t want any comments at all on your site (or on specific post types). Don’t use the Disable Comments plugin if you want to choose which posts/pages to disable comments.

Have you disabled comments on your WordPress site? What method did you use? Share your recommendations in the comments.