How to remove page comment boxes from WordPress.org themes

Fairy Blog Mother

This is a technical post specifically for WordPress.org bloggers. Recently I wrote a post showing how to remove a page’s comment box in a WordPress.com blog, as this kind of blog does not provide the option to go into the code to change it, and my research revealed the process in the ‘Quick Edit’ menu.

refers to WP.org

But going through my analytics I noted I had a lot of hits for the keyphrase relating to removing comment boxes from pages, but they all seemed to bounce without being read. Why was this? Then I realised it was because I wasn’t explaining how to do this in a WordPress.org blog. So here’s how:

Go to page.php and check it refers to comments.

Look for this code: <?php comments_template( “, true ); ?>

You can either delete this, or block its action by inserting // immediately after ?php:

<?php// comments_template( ” , true ); ?>

If you want to reactive it again, merely remove the //

Remember to activate comments in the Settings > Discussion menu.

There you go… hope it works and you have pages that are comment box free on your blog.

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Alice Elliott

Alice Elliott has been explaining blogging to beginner bloggers for almost two decades, specialising in using ordinary, everyday language to make the process as simple as possible so that anybody can understand.

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