Disable Comments in WordPress

WordPress has a built-in comment system that works great. However, in some cases we want to completely disable comments on the site, especially if your site is not a blog but a corporate or store site.

For some of you it is enough to disable this via Discussion settings in the WordPress dashboard, but sometimes that is not enough. Here is code to disable comments on WordPress sites.

This code completely disables the comment system in WordPress and also removes comments from the dashboard. Add the following code to your functions.php file:

function sv_disable_comments_post_types_support() {
	$post_types = get_post_types();
	foreach ($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');
		}
	}
}
add_action('admin_init', 'sv_disable_comments_post_types_support');

function sv_disable_comments_status() {
	return false;
}
add_filter('comments_open', 'sv_disable_comments_status', 20, 2);
add_filter('pings_open', 'sv_disable_comments_status', 20, 2);

function sv_disable_comments_hide_existing_comments($comments) {
	$comments = array();
	return $comments;
}
add_filter('comments_array', 'sv_disable_comments_hide_existing_comments', 10, 2);

function sv_disable_comments_admin_menu() {
	remove_menu_page('edit-comments.php');
}
add_action('admin_menu', 'sv_disable_comments_admin_menu');

function sv_disable_comments_admin_menu_redirect() {
	global $pagenow;
	if ($pagenow === 'edit-comments.php') {
		wp_redirect(admin_url()); exit;
	}
}
add_action('admin_init', 'sv_disable_comments_admin_menu_redirect');

function sv_disable_comments_dashboard() {
	remove_meta_box('dashboard_recent_comments', 'dashboard', 'normal');
}
add_action('admin_init', 'sv_disable_comments_dashboard');

function sv_disable_comments_admin_bar() {
	if (is_admin_bar_showing()) {
		remove_action('admin_bar_menu', 'wp_admin_bar_comments_menu', 60);
	}
}
add_action('init', 'sv_disable_comments_admin_bar');

This snippet uses WordPress hooks. Learn more in WordPress Hooks Explained.