How to Enable & Disable Comments in WordPress

Comments are essential part of WordPress websites especially if you are using it for blogging or business purposes. Since they encourage conversation between you and your users, it will massively help you to get valuable feedback from your audience. On the other hand, threads can require a lot of moderation to avoid toxic environment or any spam posts.  In this article, we will give you a brief on how you can Enable & Disable Comments in WordPress.

Why You Might Need to Enable or Disable Comments in WordPress?

To inspire your audience to get engaged with your contents, enabling comments is a great technique to apply. It can help turn a simple conversation into a discussion and will help build the community. Since search engines such as Google index the comments, it can boost your SEO score as well. Moreover, you can improve your overall website by allowing the feedback left by the audience.

Despite lots of pros, there are some downsides of allowing comments on your contents as well. Too many negative or aggressive feedbacks can turn a specific article or even the whole website into a toxic environment. Plus, spam or self-promotional remarks never do any good for the site. A good solution is to cut down on inappropriate comments by moderating all of them. But it can actually take a lot of your productive time. That’s when you need to disable comments for your WordPress posts.

How to Enable and Disable Comments in WordPress

By Default, WordPress allows users to comment on your posts. You can easily change that scenario depending on your requirements. If you want to disable comments for all your future posts, you can do so by navigating to your WordPress Dashboard -> Settings -> Discussion.

The Discussion Settings gives you control over how you want to run your post thread. You will have the freedom to moderate the comments based on your specified characteristics. To avoid spam, you can easily blacklist any unnecessary feedback which falls under the rules you have set.

At the top of the page, you will see the ‘Default Article Settings’ section. If you haven’t touched this setting before,  readers will be allowed to make feedback on your articles by default. So, you don’t have to manually enable comments. However, to prevent your users from leaving any remarks in your future blogs, you can simply just uncheck the box ‘Allow people to post comments on new articles’. This rule will only be applied for the upcoming contents. Besides, you can also delete the previous comments made by your audience as well. From ‘Other Comment Settings’ section, you can automatically close comments for your older contents.

At the same time, WordPress gives you the flexibility to disable comments for individual posts as well. Regardless of the settings you have defined from the ‘Discussion’ settings as mentioned above, it can be overridden if you choose to make any changes for a specific content manually. Under the ‘Document’ tab, you will see the ‘Discussion’ section. From there, you can just go ahead and turn off comments for that particular article. As a result, your audience won’t be able to leave any messages for that certain blog.

To make things easier, you can even change the Comment Status for multiple contents at the same time as well. Simply just go to your Posts page and select the posts which you want to Edit. Then, you will be able to easily disable comments by editing the articles in bulk. You can do the same to allow comments as well.

Final Thoughts

We have already discussed the scenarios when you can allow your readers to leave their remarks on your contents. To finish this off, we hope that this tutorial will help you out to easily enable and disable comments for your WordPress Posts.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave your feedback in the Comments section.