JPKCom Disable Comments — Guide & Tips
Disable WordPress comments site-wide with JPKCom Disable Comments — installation, requirements and practical tips.
JPKCom Disable Comments disables the WordPress core comments functionality for the entire site. Useful when you simply don't need comments on a corporate or documentation site.
Guide
Requirements
- WordPress 6.9 or newer (tested up to WordPress 7.1)
- PHP 8.3 or newer
Installation
- In your admin panel, go to Plugins → Add New and click Upload Plugin.
- Choose the plugin's ZIP file and click Install Now.
- Click Activate.
How it works
There is no settings page — once active, the plugin disables the core comments functionality globally. Comment and trackback support is removed from every post type, comments and pings are forced closed, and the Comments screen, admin menu entry and admin-bar node are gone.
Beyond that, the plugin closes the routes through which comments otherwise remain visible or reachable:
- The dashboard shows no comment count and no moderation list.
- The comment feeds (
/comments/feed/and<post>/feed/) return 404 instead of serving stored comments, and the feed discovery links are gone. The regular post feed at/feed/is unaffected. - The REST comment endpoints are removed (since version 1.0.1), and REST post responses report
comment_statusandping_statusasclosed.
Existing comments are not deleted — they stay in the database, out of reach of the front end, the feeds and the REST API. Deactivating the plugin makes them visible again.
Tips & Tricks
- Global instead of per post: The plugin works site-wide — you no longer have to disable comments manually on each individual post or page.
- The feeds were the leak: Up to version 1.0.8 existing comments were still publicly retrievable through the comment feeds. Those feeds are built by
WP_Querydirectly via$wpdband bypass the filter the plugin relied on. If you switched comments off on an older version, check/comments/feed/after updating. - Dashboard only clean since 1.0.9: Before that, the comment count in "At a Glance" and the moderation list in the Activity widget were still there.
- REST API covered: The comment REST endpoints are removed, so comments are no longer reachable via the API either. The stored
comment_statusin the database is deliberately left alone —closedis what gets reported, and the fields keep their place in the response so the block editor sees the shape it expects. - Reproducible updates: Since version 1.0.2 the plugin uses secure self-hosted updates via GitHub with SHA256 checksums and runs with
declare(strict_types=1).
Further reading
- Source code on GitHub: https://github.com/JPKCom/jpkcom-disable-comments
- API documentation (PHPDoc): https://jpkcom.github.io/jpkcom-disable-comments/docs/
- This project's changelog