How to remove Comments in WordPress
When you have a WordPress site, you want visitors who show an interest in your product or service. If selling or blogging, you might be getting a lot of unwanted comments in your blog. Of course, engagement is good, but it can have the opposite effect. Here, we are going to tell you a little about disabling comments in WordPress and how you can do it in a variety of ways to suit your website.
Why would you disable WordPress comments?
You might be wondering why anyone would want to know how to turn off comments on WordPress, but you will actually this is fairly common. One reason might be because your site isn’t a blog. Many people use WordPress as a template for building a site and so comments don’t actually make sense in most cases. You might also want to disable comments on WordPress to prevent trolling. These trolls leaving behind nasty comments. They could be of poor language, unrelated to your work, or even just advertising links. This is a common reason why many businesses opt to disable comments in WordPress. It just removes that ability for them to even try!
How To Disable Comments On A Page Or Post
WordPress pages have comments switched off by default. Easy eh? This is something which can be changed, however, and so it might be useful that you learn a bit more about the WordPress disable comments feature on pages. All you do is visit the ‘All Pages’ window and choose the ‘Edit’ link on the corresponding page. You should come across an option to check the ‘Discussion’ box and choose ‘Allow Comments’ if you want this to happen. This is something which can be mirrored on your individual posts as well.
How to Disable comment on new WordPress Posts
If you wish to never have comments on your blog posts, it’s best to do it right at the start. You can disable the comments for any new posts, and this can come in very handy. To do this, head to the ‘Settings’ page and then the ‘Discussion’ tab. Look for ‘Allow people to post comments on new articles’. Once you have decided on whether you want this to be active or not, you can save your changes and be sure that this is not going to happen in the future. You can also fix it so they can post comments, but have to register first, and then have to be approved as well. It adds a few hurdles, if they really really want to post. If you also add Google Recaptcha, this means those who really want to, can. But Bots and Spammers, will be seriously put off.
Deleting old WordPress Comments
If you have already had some comments on your WordPress site that are not terribly useful, then you might find that deleting comments might be something which you prefer to do. This is something which can be done individually, or you can select some comments to delete at the same time.
This is done by heading to the ‘Comments’ part of your WordPress site (Comments, under the left Admin menu) and checking the comments which you would like to delete. These can be moved to trash and you can choose ‘Apply’ once you are happy with the comments that you have chosen. This might take a while to do if you have a lot of comments that you want to delete and so this is something which you need to think about. But you can also assign them as Spam, which helps the system learn what is bad. Though this is not foolproof by any means!
WordPress Disable Comments with a plugin
If you don’t have time to spend deleting comments individually or even in bulk, then you might want to use a plugin.
There’s always a plugin!
This is the easy way to delete comments on WordPress and it can save you a lot of time. Take a look online at the Disable Comments Plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-comments-rb/) which is available to download. This plugin can help you out a lot and give you the freedom to decide what is best for your site. If you are unsure about downloading and installing plugins, get in touch with us. This install would take about 15 minutes to install and apply.
Comments on a WordPress site, mostly the Blog, are a good idea. But more often than not, once your site becomes establish and Spam Bots find it, you may get very busy with it. And even spotted that bad from the good can be tricky. So we hope this article has helped a little.
