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HOWTO: Easily Disable Comments on Posts in WordPress

After a recent WordPress blog import – I needed to make sure comments were not allowed on any previous or future posts. You can easily disable any future posts from having comments by changing the setting in “Settings > Discussion > “Allow people to post comments on new articles” (see screenshot) – but you can override that setting on a post by post basis when editing older posts.

Now the I had all comments set to off for future posts – it was time to address the older/existing posts which all had “Allow comments” set to yes. In order to quickly change all existing posts I used the “Bulk Actions” option when listing all posts. From there I selected “Edit” and then made sure all of the posts were highlighted (50 at a time).

That then brought up the option to set Comments to “Do not allow” for the selected posts. After going through this process a few times – all my posts now had comments turned off and I was done.

You could also update all your posts with a database query – but this way allows you to quickly and easily take care of changing your comment status, post format type, author, status, categories, and tags.

Lesson learned: do not underestimate the power of the “Bulk Actions” for making quick/easy changes to your posts.