Time for another WordPress Wednesday! Weekly tips for new and established self-hosted WordPress users, designed to help you get the most out of your site from WordPress website developer Sarah Chong.
How to Turn Off WordPress Comments
Today we’re going to talk about comments and how to turn them off. If you’ve been using WordPress for a while you’ll know that every so often spammers start honing in on old posts, flooding them with irrelevant comments or trackback links, which is a pain and, frankly, kind of annoying. Or maybe your posts are time sensitive, and you want to close comments after a certain amount of time.
There are a few different ways to turn off WordPress comments, but all of them are pretty simple :) If you only want to turn off comments for a particular post, you can do that while you’re writing it. Scroll down past the content box and you’ll see a section headed Discussion. Untick the “Allow comments” box and you’re all set.
If you want to turn comments off across your site, you can do that via the settings. Hover over settings in the sidebar and then click on Discussion. You’ll see a heading that says Default article settings. Just untick the “allow people to post comments on new articles” button, and by default every new post will have comments turned off.
It’s worth remembering that (at the time of writing) there’s no way to change the comment status on every previously published post (altho you can do about 20 in one go). If you want to turn off comments on every post you’ve even written it’s worth looking for a plugin to do that for you. Doing it manually is an option but it might take a while if you’ve got a lot of posts! :)
There’s one more handy tip, if you want to close comments after a certain amount of time, then just check this box and adjust the number of days to suit your site:
This can get around the closing comments on every post problem, as all the older posts will then have closed comments automatically. Voila!
