A friend asked recently,

Isn’t there a way in WordPress to turn of comments globally? I have unchecked everything in the discussion settings and the posts still show a comment box. What have I missed?

There are 3 things you need to keep in mind when it comes to comment display. The general setting, Old posts and the theme.

New blog sites

If it’s a new site then you want to make sure you set comments to off under Discussions. You also want to make sure to go into your default first post and page individually and uncheck the allow comments box.

Existing blog sites

If it is an existing site with posts and pages added, the process is the same. Turn it off under Discussions – this will turn comments off from the time you set it off onward but not past posts.

You can disable comments in bulk using the bulk edit feature – select all posts then hit edit and apply but if you have thousands of posts – hmm… I generally prefer to edit the database 😉

But wait! There’s the theme

None of the above settings will work if the theme is poorly coded to ignore them. You see, a good theme will check with WordPress. If comments are turned on, then display comments/form if not then don’t display. But sometimes the theme developer doesn’t do that or it was there and whoever edited the theme removed the coding.

If you turned off all the settings and still see the comments/form, then it’s got to be the theme.

You’ll have to edit it and that would depend largely on the theme. On the default theme, you could simply remove the comments_template tag from loop-single.php and the entire comments and form will be gone. For other themes it’s best to check with the theme developer.