How to Enable or Disable Comments in WordPress

Comments enable your website visitors to interact with you and with each other. However, enabling comments may put your website at security risks such as spam or malicious content. Therefore, some users don’t prefer comments on their blogs. No matter what the case is WordPress deals with comments effectively as it allows you to enable or disable comments using various methods. 

In this guide, we will explore different methods of enabling or disabling comments in WordPress.

Enabling or Disabling Comments in WordPress

WordPress allows us to enable or disable comments on all published posts and pages, future posts, specific posts, individual posts, and media. We recommend you install WordPress on CyberPanel to take full advantage of its tremendous features and ease of management.

Let’s explore each possible case one by one to enable or disable WordPress comments:

1. Enabling or Disabling Comments on New Posts

You can enable disable WordPress comments on new (future) posts. To do this, login to your WordPress dashboard and navigate to the settings:

Now access the Discussion Settings and tick the check box for “allow people to submit comments on new posts” to enable WordPress comments on new posts:

To disable WordPress comments for new posts in WordPress, simply uncheck this setting.

2. Enabling or Disabling Comments on a Specific Post

WordPress supports a handy feature that allows enabling or disabling comments on specific posts. This feature provides more flexibility, as you can control discussions on individual posts. Using this feature, you can allow comments where feedback is needed while disabling them for other posts or pages.

For this purpose, navigate to the Posts section, then click on All Posts from your WordPress dashboard. After this, choose the posts for which you want to enable or disable comments, select Edit, and then click on the Apply button:

In the Edit Post settings, under the Comments dropdown, select Allow to enable comments or Do not allow to disable WordPress comments, and finally hit the Update button to apply the changes:

3. Enabling or Disabling Comments on All Existing Posts

To enable or disable WordPress comments on all existing posts in WordPress, select all posts on the current page, select Edit, and click the Apply button from the Bulk Actions dropdown menu:

Now select Allow or Do not allow to enable or disable WordPress comments, respectively, and then hit the Update button to apply the changes:

This method will enable or disable comments for all posts on the current page. However, if you have multiple pages of posts, you will need to repeat this process for each page to apply the changes to all posts.

4. Enabling or Disabling Comments on an Individual Post

WordPress allows us to manage comments for each (individual) post. To do this, navigate to Posts in the WordPress dashboard and click on the post whose comments you want to manage. In the post-editing section, locate the Discussion panel:

Select Open to enable WordPress comments for the selected post and Closed to disable the comments section.

5. Enabling or Disabling Comments on Media

When you upload media files to your website, WordPress automatically makes separate pages for each file. These pages can get comments just like regular posts or pages. WordPress allows us to manage comments for Media as well. For this purpose, navigate to Media and then Library. Select a media file for which you want to manage comments, and click on the edit button:

Now, find the Discussion panel, tick the check box to enable comments, and uncheck to disable comments on the selected media:

Note: If you can’t see the discussion panel, click on the Screen Options at the top right and check the Discussion box.

Conclusion

In WordPress, comments allow website visitors to engage with your content. However, they can also lead to security issues like spam. WordPress lets us enable or disable comments on new posts, specific posts, all existing posts, individual posts, and even media files. This flexibility helps you customize your site’s commenting options.

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