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:
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');