Recently I encountered a situation which made me think I should disable WordPress comments or leave them on.

A friend of mine shared one of his blog posts on Facebook and asked for feedback. I read his post and left a comment on his blog, but the actual discussion about his post was on Facebook, NOT on his blog.

This is just one example showing, that blog comments are losing their relevancy.

Blog comments' main purpose is to give your readers a chance to share their thoughts on your content.

However, people already do that - on social networks.

Every time you share a link to your post or they share your contents, they write a sentence or two with their thoughts.

Reasons to disable WordPress comments

Well-known writers and bloggers like Chris Brogan already disabled comments on their site.

1. No more spam comments

In his post, Chris states that spam comments were a big reason for the decision, cleaning them up just took him too long.

Most likely, this will resonate with you. It certainly does with me. When I disable WordPress comments, there won't be a single spam comment anymore. And nothing to clean up.

2. Comments are scattered anyways

There's just no single place where people leave comments, they're all over the place. Whether it's social media, your blog, or in replies to your emails - people are talking everywhere.

Should you disable WordPress comments?

It's a decision you have to make on your own, I can't give advice. It's dependent on your current situation.

For WP Mastery, I'm most likely going to disable the comment function.

There's a neat plugin for that: https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-comments/

Removing the Disqus comment function will also speed up my website - which is always a good thing.

However, this would force me to go through hundreds of articles.

I'd say that in more than 50% of my posts I ask readers to leave a comment. And that would be pretty pointless when there's no comment function.

So, I'm still evaluating the situation. But most likely you won't see a comment section on my next articles.