How To Turn On Commenting For Wordpress Blog

WordPress is the perfect platform for blogging with many built-in features. Comment management is one of the important features allowing users to provide their feedback about your article or post their query. As a site owner, you can easily moderate and manage comments at individual post or page level. In this article let us explore different ways to enable or disable comments for posts and pages in WordPress.

WordPress allows to create two types of content – posts and pages. By default commenting is disabled on pages and enabled on blog posts. You can modify the settings to enable or disable comments at individual post / page level. However, we recommend to disable comments for pages like contact, about, testimonial, etc.

You can enable or disable comments on new posts under "Settings > Discussion > Default article settings" as shown below:

Checking the box against "Allow people to post comments on new article" will enable comments on all newly published articles. Important to note here is – enabling or disabling the checkbox will only affect commenting on new blog posts. The comments on already published articles will remain intact and users should be able to comment continuously.

Enable or Disable Comments on Individual Articles

Click on the "Screen Options" available on top right corner on the Classic editor. You can view all the available meta boxes applicable for that screen and choose "Discussion" meta box.

Once the checkbox is enabled, scroll down to bottom of the screen to find "Discussion" meta box. Here you can enable or disable comments on individual article level with the option "Allow comments".

If you are using Gutenberg block editor, click on the three dots "Options" button available on the top right corner of the editor. Go to "Panels" section and turn on "Discussion" option.

This will enable "Discussion" meta box in the sidebar. Uncheck "Allow comments" option to disable comment only in that article.

Using Quick Edit Option

Instead of going into the editor, you can allow or disallow comments using "Qucik Edit" option under "Pages > All Pages". Hove over the article to see the additional options and click on the "Quick Edit" option. Here you can enable or disable comments using "Allow Comments" checkbox.

Managing comments page by page is a difficult task when you need to do it on multiple articles. In such cases, same "Quick Edit" option can be used in bulk. Navigate to "Pages > All Pages" and select the pages you want to enable or disable comments. Choose the "Edit" option from the "Bulk Actions" dropdown menu and click on "Apply" button.

Choose "Allow" or "Disallow" for the comments dropdown to enable or disable comments on all the selected pages.

Note: You can manage comments for individual and multiple posts under "Posts > All Posts" using "Quick Edit" option. You can also use "Discussion" meta box in post editor for single blog post.