How to Completely Disable Comments in WordPress (Ultimate Guide)

Disable Comments on Future Posts

If you’ve just started your WordPress site, you can easily stop comments on your future posts.

To do that, go to Settings » Discussion from the left sidebar of your WordPress admin panel.

On this page, you need to uncheck the option that says “Allow people to post comments on new articles” and then click on the Save Changes button to store your settings.

This will disable comments on all your future posts. However, if you want to allow or disallow comments on a specific post, then you can still do it without changing this setting.

We’ll cover that in the next section.

Disable Comments on a Specific Page or Post

By default, comments are turned off on all your pages.

However, WordPress gives you the freedom to enable or disable comments on individual pages and posts.

Simply head over to Pages » All Pages from the left sidebar. On the next page, you need to hover your mouse cursor over the title of a page that you want enable or disable comments and click the Edit link.

On the top-right corner of your page, you’ll see the 3 vertical dots icon. You need to click on it to open a dropdown menu and then click on Options.

This will open a popup box, and you need to make sure the Discussion box is enabled here.

Once you close this modal box, you’ll see the Discussion meta box on the right side of your editor. If you don’t see it, then please make sure that you click on the Document tab to view it.

Now, you can uncheck the Allow Comments box to disable comments on this page and click on Update to save the changes.

On the other hand, if you want to selectively enable comments, then you can just check the box to enable it for certain pages.

You can follow the same process for turning off comments on individual posts or other custom post types.

Disable Comments on Pages and Posts in Bulk

Want to disable comments on all your published posts and pages without doing it individually? You can do that without the use of a plugin.

First of all, go to Posts » All Posts to see all your articles.

Next, select all the posts, choose Edit from the Bulk Actions dropdown box, and click on Apply.

You’ll now be able to perform bulk actions including changing the author name and turning off comments for all the selected posts.

Select Do not allow from the comments dropdown box and click on Update. This will disable comments on all your selected posts.

You can follow the same process to turn off comments on your pages.

Delete All WordPress Comments

While the above methods will disable comments on your posts and pages, it will not remove the existing comments from your WordPress site.

To delete all the comments from your site, click on Comments from the left sidebar of your admin panel.

Next select all the comments, choose Move to Trash option from the Bulk Actions dropdown box, and click on Apply. This will delete all the existing comments from your site.

If your website has a lot of comments, then you will have to repeat this step multiple times.

Disable Comments on Media

If you are looking to disable comments on media pages, then there are two ways to go about it.

You can either manually disable comments on individual media attachment files by following the methods we discussed above but that can be really time consuming.

The easier way to bulk disable comments on all media attachments is by using a code snippet. Simply paste the following code in your theme’s functions.php file or a site-specific plugin.

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In case you’re not comfortable with the above solution, you can check out the next section where we’ll show you how to use a plugin to disable comments on Media attachments.

Disable WordPress Comments the Easy Way Using a Plugin

If you don’t want to disable comments manually, then you can use the Disable Comments plugin to do it with just a click.

It allows you to completely disable comments everywhere on your WordPress site. You can also disable them on specific post types like posts, pages, media, and others. It also removes the comment form and stops displaying existing comments.

First thing you need to do is install and activate the Disable Comments plugin. 

After activating the plugin, head over to Settings » Disable Comments from the left sidebar of your admin panel.

Selecting the first option allows you to disable comments on your WordPress site. The plugin will also remove the comments menu item from your WordPress admin area.

Using the second option, you can selectively disable comments on your posts, pages, or media.

If you want to remove comments only from the media attachments, then you can select On certain post types radio button and then check the Media checkbox.

You can do the same if you only want to turn off comments on WordPress pages. Using the plugin is the easiest way to disable comments on WordPress pages.

When you’re done, simply click on the Save Changes to complete the process.

Remove “Comments Are Closed” in WordPress

If your WordPress theme is not checking the comment status properly, then it may still display the comment form, existing comments, or even show the “Comments are closed” message.

You can ask your theme developer to fix this because this is not a standard compliant approach.

Alternatively, you can also try fixing it yourself by following the instructions below.

First, connect to your WordPress site using FTP Client or the File Manager in your WordPress hosting control panel. Now navigate to your current theme folder which will be located in /wp-content/themes/ folder.

In your theme folder, you need to locate the file comments.php, right-click on that file, and rename it to comments_old.php.

Next, you need to right-click in the right panel of your FTP client and select Create new file option. And then, name your new file as comments.php and click the OK button.

This trick simply serves an empty comments template to your WordPress theme, so no comments or comment related messages will be shown.

If your WordPress theme does not have the comments.php file, then you need to ask your theme developer which file you need to edit.

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