Disabling Comments in WordPress

2020-12-28

I seem to come across a decent amount of clients and users online that have a difficult time knowing how to disable comments for both future and previous blog posts. It isn’t the easiest for both use cases, so let’s break it down.

Back to the future

Disabling comments on all future blog posts is fairly straightforward:

1. Navigate to your WordPress admin dashboard
2. Go to Settings > Discussion
3. Uncheck Allow people to submit comments on new posts
4. That’s it!

But what about old posts?

Have no fear - “Bulk Actions” are here to save the day! In order to retroactively disable comments on older posts, do the following:

1. Navigate to Posts
2. Select the specific posts you would like to disable comments on (or select all of them)
3. Click the Bulk Actions drop-down menu and choose Edit
4. Press Apply
5. In the Bulk Edit view, look for the Comments drop-down
6. Select Do Not Allow and click Update
7. That’s it!

I hope this article saves others any headaches in the future. WordPress itself could certainly make this more streamlined, but for now what we have works. Happy (not) commenting!