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There are lots of reasons why you may or may not want to have comments on your site. Having comments can help boost engagement and often tells search engines that people value your content. However, comments can also generate a lot of spam and be another part of your website that you must maintain. It can feel like a lot of work as bots will go through and post wherever they can. The problem is only getting worse. If you pay for the akismet plugin it really helps if you find comments useful for your blog/website.

How to enable/disable comments on your site*

Go to the dashboard or back end of your website. In the left column/menu select Settings. Then, scroll down and select Discussion.

2. You’ll see the Discussion Settings. By default, WordPress allows comments globally. Find the row where it says “Allow people to submit comments on new posts” and unclick or deselect this.

3. Scroll down to the bottom of the page, and click on the blue button that says Save Change.

* Please note that this change only applies from this point on. So, if you have already published blog posts, you will need to manually turn comments off for each of those posts.

How to enable/disable comments on a particular page

When you are editing the post page that you want to remove comments from, direct your attention to the right column and select Post.

2. Scroll down the column and select Discussion. Then click the box next to Allow Comments.

Uncheck the box under discussion that says allow comments

3. Scroll back to the top of the page. Either select Save Draft (if you are still working on your unpublished post), Publish (if you are ready for your post to go live or Update (if you are updating an already published post).

WordPress originally started out as a blogging platform. Today it is powerful enough to run a very complex website, but it is still an easy way to start a blog. Assuming that you already have a site in WordPress (if you don’t, contact me and I would be happy to work with you to set one up).

To add a blog post, you are going to want to make sure that you are logged into your site and that you have at least Author permissions for your website. You can find the login page by adding /wp-login.php to the end of the URL. So if your website was located at www.cupcakes-are-awesome.com the login page would be www.cupcakes-are-awesome.com/wp-login.php.

You should now see the Dashboard or backend of your WordPress website. Today, we want to add a blog post. We can start the process using two different links. The first is at located in the dark grey navigation bar at the top of the page. From here, select + New, and then in the dropdown menu, Post.

Add a new blog post to your word press site using the top nav

You can also do this from the dashboard navigation bar on the left, select Posts, and then in the dropdown menu, Add New.

Add a new blog post to your wordpress site using the left or side nav

However you decide to start the new post, now you should see a blank post page. Let’s start this blog posting party!

Enter a title (this will be your H1 tag on the top of the page as well as the URL of your page (with dashes).
Enter the content in the main WYSIWYG editor.
Select the Catagories of your post (feel free to add new ones).
You can also add tags for your post.
Add a featured image for your post. You will want it to be a minimum of 845 pixels wide and a minimum of 321 pixels tall. Try and keep the resolution low (or at least not that high) so that the file size is small(ish), preferable under 120kb so as not to slow down the load time of the page.To select the image for your post,
1. A. Scroll down to the bottom and in the right column, click Set featured image.
2. You will see a popup for Featured Images. You can select one that is already uploaded in your Media Library click the Upload Files tab to start the process of uploading a new image.
3. Here you can drop the file onto the page or Select Files from your computer to upload to your site. Once it is uploaded, your new image will appear in the Media Library tab. Add an alt text that is rich in keywords relating to your post, then click the blue button, Set featured image.
4. You will now see this image under the Featured Image section. You can select a different image by clicking Remove featured image or scroll up to the top to publish the post.
When you are done with this, scroll up to the top of the page. in the top right-hand side, you will notice several things under the section header Publish.You can save this post as a draft while you work on it, you can click preview to see what it would look like live in a new window. If you would like for the system to publish the post in the future, under the Publish section on the right-hand column, select Edit next to Publish immediately. Then, select the date and time that you would like to have the content live on your site. Once the date is in place, select OK and then the blue Publish button. It is a useful feature to be able to publish blog posts on a schedule.