Disable comments

One toggle does four things. It closes comments and pingbacks on every post, new and existing. It hides existing comments on the front end. It removes comment-reply.js from your pages. And it removes the Comments menu item from wp-admin and the comments item from the admin bar.

Existing comments are not deleted. They stay in the database exactly as they were, so nothing is lost and turning the feature back off restores everything.

The result is a WordPress install that behaves as though comments were never part of it, which is what most business and brochure sites actually want.

The Maintenance module is off by default on a new install. Switch it on from the Vectro dashboard before this feature can run.

Comment spam is automated and indiscriminate. A form that nobody uses still receives submissions continuously, each one costing a database write and a moderation queue entry, and each one a small opportunity for a link injection attempt against a site that is not watching.

There is a smaller performance benefit too – comment-reply.js stops loading on every single page. But the real gain is removing an entire input surface that was never serving you, and clearing the admin clutter that comes with it.

Vectro filters comments_open and pings_open to closed for every post, returns an empty comment list when a theme displays comments, dequeues and deregisters the comment-reply script, and removes the Comments menu item and the admin bar comments item. Existing rows in wp_comments are untouched.

Because this is applied through filters rather than by rewriting settings, deactivating Vectro restores the previous behaviour immediately and your original discussion settings are still intact underneath.