Easily Allow/Disallow Comments On Individual WordPress Posts/Pages

I was wandering around Twitter earlier today and a question popped up on how to allow comments on a newly created page in WordPress.

One of the most important aspects of blogging is fostering communication and interaction with your readers. Getting a good discussion going keeps your readers interested, and gives them a reason to check back – especially if they know you are good about replying to them.

A good stream of comments also tells Google and other search engines that your content is both relevant and interesting to users… which encourages them to rank you well on the results pages.

Obviously, I’m talking about genuine comments here, and not the spam that so many blogs are plagued with. That’s a discussion for another day.

As great as comments are however, there may be specific posts or pages that you don’t want comments on, like your “About” or “Contact” pages. Fortunately comment options, like most features of a WordPress blog, are customizable.

First and foremost, make sure you’re blog has comments enabled. The default comment settings for your entire blog can be found under the “Settings” module of your dashboard, on the “Discussion” screen. The third option on the page is “Allow people to post comments on new articles.” If that is checked, the default for new posts and pages will be to allow comments. Changing this setting will not, however, alter the setting for existing content.

In order to allow or disallow commenting on individual posts, options are provided on the post/page writing screen. Below
the content section where you type your posts, there are a handful of different sections. One of these sections is labeled “Discussion,” and has two options. The first option controls whether or not comments are allowed on this particular post or page, while the second enables or disables trackbacks and pingbacks.

Both of these settings will reflect whatever the default on the main “Discussion Settings” page was set to at the time the post/page was created. If those options were disabled by default and you’ve recently changed them, you can update the setting for this post by checking the box.

Now, while WordPress supports commenting on both posts and pages, certain themes might have their own settings that override the defaults, or might not display comments on pages at all.

If you’ve checked that both the default and the specific page is set to allow comments, but they still aren’t displaying and there isn’t a comment entry box, check for a theme options page under the “Apperance” module of your dashboard. If there isn’t one, or if it doesn’t offer a way to enable page comments, you’ll need to customize your theme’s page file to do so (or find someone incredibly talented comfortable with WordPress to do it for you. ).

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Chad is the author of www.WelcomeToWordPress.com, a blog dedicated to helping you create and optimize your very own WordPress blog with articles, tips, and step-by-step video tutorials.