Disable Comments in WordPress without any Plugin

Comments are a good way to keep in touch with your audience but you may not always need it. And it's a good idea to disable comments completely, if you don't need them. This helps you to keep the website clean and avoid unnecessary comment spam.

And to disable comments, there are tons of plugins available in the WordPress plugin repo. But, why add more bloat/dependency by installing another plugin, when you can easily disable comments by adding a few lines of code?

Code to disable WordPress comments

The below PHP code will fully disable the comment system on your WordPress website:

php

function disable_comments_feature() {
    // Disable support for comments and trackbacks in post types
    $post_types = get_post_types();
    foreach ($post_types as $post_type) {
        if (post_type_supports($post_type, 'comments')) {
            remove_post_type_support($post_type, 'comments');
            remove_post_type_support($post_type, 'trackbacks');
        }
    }
  
    // Close comments on the front-end
    add_filter('comments_open', '__return_false', 20);
    add_filter('pings_open', '__return_false', 20);
  
    // Hide existing comments from the front-end
    add_filter('comments_array', '__return_empty_array', 10, 2);
  
    // Remove comments menu from admin panel
    add_action('admin_menu', function () {
        remove_menu_page('edit-comments.php');
    });
 
    // Redirect any user trying to access comments page
    add_action('admin_init', function () {
        global $pagenow;
        
        if ($pagenow === 'comment.php' || $pagenow === 'edit-comments.php') {
            wp_redirect(admin_url());
            exit;
        }
    });
}
 
add_action('init', 'disable_comments_feature');

How to add this code to your WordPress site

How to Add PHP Code to WordPress