Delete & Disable Comments gives WordPress administrators a focused screen for comment cleanup and comment shutdown tasks. Open it under Tools Delete & Disable Comments.

Many older sites collect spam comments, unused discussion threads, or imported comment data that no longer belongs on the site. This plugin keeps those maintenance actions in one place without asking you to edit the database manually.

Why use it?

Delete all comments marked as spam after confirmation.
Delete all comments after confirmation.
Download a CSV backup before deleting all comments.
Disable comments site-wide with a single toggle.
Close comments and pings on existing posts when disable mode is active.
Use a standard WordPress admin screen available only to administrators.

Common use cases

Remove accumulated spam comments from a site.
Prepare a site that no longer accepts discussion.
Clean comments before a redesign, migration, or client handover.
Download a CSV copy of comment data before permanent deletion.
Close open comment status on existing posts without triggering save_post hooks.

What Disable Comments does

The Disable Comments toggle changes the site’s comment behavior. When enabled, it sets WordPress defaults for new content to closed, prevents new comment and ping submissions, hides front-end comment output, removes comment-related UI, blocks comment REST endpoints, unregisters comment-related blocks, and removes the recent comments widget.

It does not delete existing comments. It also does not run a scheduled cleanup. If existing posts still have open comment or ping status, the admin screen shows a maintenance notice with a Close all comments now button. That button performs one direct SQL update to close those fields and avoids per-post save_post hooks, which is useful for sites using WPML, Yoast SEO, Polylang, or other plugins that listen to post updates.

Translations

The plugin ships with gettext translation files for broad EU language support, including German and additional EU locales. WordPress loads the matching .mo file automatically based on the site language. Text domain: delete-disable-comments.