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How to Disable Comments in WordPress Without Plugin: Stop Spam Comments and Save Time on Managing Them

Disable Comments in WordPress without Plugin

You can easily disable comments in WordPress without a plugin. All you have to do is follow a few simple steps as shown below.

A WordPress blog makes it easy for visitors to your blog to leave comments. Comments are useful to gauge what about your blog post resonates with readers.

Some comments may give you ideas for future posts. These may come in the form of questions asked by visitors on the blog topic.

But most of the time, this doesn’t happen. All you get are spam comments that have nothing to do with your blog

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Comments are left behind by those looking for backlinks to their sites. Knowing that their low-quality sites have no chance of ranking in the search engines, they push their luck to attract traffic through blog commenting.

Although you can turn on comment moderation to prevent these comments from being published, they can be quite an annoyance.

You would have to spend time sifting these comments to pick out the genuine ones.

If you’re receiving hundreds of spam comments and almost no genuine ones, then it is a good idea to disable comments altogether.

There are plugins to disable comments. However, you may not want to use them. You don’t want another plugin to add to the dozens you already have.

If so, here’s an easy way to disable comments in WordPress without a plugin.

Steps on How to Disable Comments in WordPress

Step 1 – Log in to Your WordPress Dashboard

This will usually be going to yoursite.com/wp-admin.

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Step 2 – Go to Settings

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From the settings Menu choose Discussion.

Step 3 – Go to Discussion Settings

In Discussion settings, untick Allow people to submit comments on new posts.

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Once done with that, click on Save Changes.

You’ve now disabled comments in WordPress without a plugin.

How to Disable Comments on Older WordPress Posts

The above steps show you how to disable comments on new posts. As soon as you save this setting, comments will not be allowed on the next and future posts.

But what about older posts?

Comments can still be made unless you disable the option to comment on older posts.

Here are the steps to disable comments on older WordPress posts.

Under Discussion Settings go to Other comment settings.

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Then select Automatically close comments on posts older than _ days. Select your preferred number of days or leave it at 1.

In our case, no comments will be allowed on posts more than a day old.

Then hit Save Changes at the bottom.

Using the settings above, you’ll see the changes immediately.

The screenshot below is before comments were disabled.

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This screenshot is after comments are disabled.

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The above two methods are the easiest ways to disable comments in WordPress without a plugin.

Using the methods above will ensure your blog isn’t swamped with spam or other unwanted comments.

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