Hello friends,

In some of my previous posts, here at The CMS Place, I have written about various solutions for better user experience regarding the comments on WordPress. You might want to check how to integrate Google + Comments, Facebook Comments, Disqus or Jetpack.

Having a comment section with many abilities for the users is great. You will be encouraging them to ask questions, provide you with feedback and even take action in conversations between them. Let’s not forget that each comment might be considered as unique content as well and might aid your SEO strategy. Also comments might help building additional internal links for your website.

Having all this in mind we need to ask ourselves one simple question – are comments always necessary and should they be present on our websites?

If the answer to this question is “No” then something needs to be done in order to prevent the users from commenting and this needs to be done globally.

In this post I will share with you two ways for achieving this for WordPress – with or without additional plugins.

Most users might prefer the “non-plugin” solution. So let’s start with it first.

Every WordPress site has a special settings section for the default comments. So if you are not using any additional solutions you have to go to “Settings -> Discussion” and then you need to decide whether or not you want the users to add comments on your new articles. If you allow the checkbox your new posts will be available for comments. If you decide to remove it the comment section might be available for the old posts, but not to the new ones that you will publish after this moment.

Also each post might have an individual setting regarding the comments. Some posts might be available for comments while others will prohibit the users from doing this by removing the section. These settings are available under the “All Posts” section in your dashboard.

For the older posts you might want to check the checkbox “Automatically close comments on articles older than X days”, where X is the number of days.

And these settings are only posts-related. For pages you have to decide individually whether or not you want comments on your pages. This is done under the “All Pages” section in your dashboard.

If you have custom post types you might need to check them individually if you want to disable the comments or not.

All of the individual settings for posts, pages and custom post types can be done in a bulk way as well.

So if you invest a certain amount of time and energy into all of this you might be able to disable all comments for your WordPress site. But is it worth all of this effort just to evade the installation of an additional plugin? It’s up to you to decide but in case you want to achieve all of these actions instantly here is how:

You simply need to install and activate the plugin Disable Comments.

You can do this in the already known ways – either by using the WordPress plugin installer or by downloading and uploading the plugin manually. You might even extract and upload the folder on your server.

When you are done you need to verify that Disable Comments is activated and then you can head to the Settings section of your WordPress website and adjust the way that the plugin behaves.

This is a multi-site solution and it acts for any post type – posts, pages, attachments, etc. It acts globally and instantly and it also prevents the individual settings so that you can be 100% sure that not a single post type can have a comment section.

And that’s not all – Disable Comments can remove any comment-related items from your widgets, dashboards, admin menu and even your admin bar.

You have to remember one thing only – if you want to manually adjust the comment options for individual post types you must never install this plugin. Disable Comments will be useful only if you want to remove all comment sections sidewide.

So there you have it, friends. You now know how to administer the comments for your WordPress website so that you can enable or disable them. You should really consider which of the two options are most suitable for you and then use it.

What do you think about this post? You can share your thoughts in the comment section below (it is not disabled for this post, trust me).  Also share this post in social media as well and help other users like you to learn how to manage these settings.

See you soon, friends!