Commenting is an essential way for readers to interact with your content. However, sometimes comments can get out of hand, distracting from your message or even enabling harassment. Fortunately, WordPress gives you granular control to disable comments as needed. In this guide, we’ll walk through several methods to turn off comments on some or all of your existing posts.
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Table of Contents
Why Disable Comments?
Before jumping in, let’s review a few reasons you may want to limit or remove commenting:
- Reduce moderation workload. Comment moderation can become time-consuming, especially for popular sites. Disabling comments means less effort spent reviewing and filtering discussions.
- Improve focus. Too many comments could distract readers from your main content. Disabling them helps keep attention on your messages.
- Handle harassment. Comment sections often attract spammers, trolls and harassment. Removing comments limits their impact.
- Showcase visuals. If your posts are image-heavy, comments could detract from featured visuals.
The decision depends on your goals. You may disable comments across everything, only on certain posts, or keep them in limited cases. WordPress makes all options possible.
Disable Comments on All Existing Posts

- Go to your WordPress dashboard Settings > Discussion
- Check the box of Automatically close comments on articles older than _ days and set the number to zero.
- Click Save Changes.
Global Comment Settings
The easiest way to disable comments across your entire WordPress site is through the global discussion settings. Here’s how:
- Log in to your WordPress dashboard and go to Settings > Discussion
- Uncheck the box next to “Allow people to post comments on new articles”Uncheck allow comments
- Click Save Changes.
Now comments are disabled for all published posts and future posts.
Selectively Disabling Comments

If you only want to disable comments on certain posts, while allowing them on others, you can toggle settings for each post individually.To disable comments for existing posts:
- Go to Posts > All Posts
- For each post you want to update, click Quick Edit or Edit
- Uncheck the box next to “Allow Comments”
- Click Update to save your changes
You can also edit posts in bulk:
- Go to Posts > All Posts
- Select multiple posts by checking the boxes
- Go to Bulk Actions > Edit
- Choose Do not allow from the dropdown menu next to “Allow Comments”
- Click Apply to update all selected posts
Removing Existing Comments
If your posts already have comments that you want to remove, you can delete them in bulk:
- Go to Comments
- Select the comments you want to delete
- Go to Bulk Actions > Move to Trash
- Click Apply to delete
This should give you an idea of how to structure and expand on the talking points into a full guide. Let me know if you have any other questions!