Disable Comments Sitewide

WordPress is one of the most popular blogging framework that is used by many different sites. Commenting is often an essential part of blogs and is a feature that is built into the WordPress framework. But many a times you might want to disable comments on a blog post, a page or the entire site. There could be any number of varied reasons for this…

• Old Posts: Posts are pretty old and are not relevant any more. You want to reduce the workload and monitor only comments on the latest posts.
• Controversial or Irrelevant Comments: Sometimes the comments can get really out of hand, because of spamming or relevancy.
• Spam Overload: Prevent spamming on your older posts that are not really active.

Whatever the reason, the process or steps to disable comments is mostly well documented in WordPress.

Disable Comments Sitewide

You can disable all the comments across the site by default, such that no comments can be posted to any of your new content.

1. Go into the WordPress Administration UI (Ex: http://website/blog/wp-admin)
2. Click on Settings
3. Click on Discussion to open the Discussion Settings panel
4. Under Default Article Settings, Uncheck the option Allow people to post comments on new articles
5. Optionally, you can uncheck all the options under Other Comment Settings section
6. Scroll down and click Save Changes to save settings

 

This will disable commenting on all the new content that will be posting. If you already have a site where comments were allowed, then you will need to disable commenting on each of those existing posts separately.