How to Disable Feedback on Your WordPress Website in 2018

WordPress is a very popular content management system (CMS) and many website owners choose to use it as their platform of choice. Having said that, not everyone wants to have all the noise in their lives and if you’re running a business blog or website you’ll know that customers can be pretty fickle when it comes to providing feedback. This is especially the case if your product is sub-par or the service they receive is less than satisfactory. In these instances, customers expect a little more from you as a business owner and not just as an individual blogger or website owner.

Sometimes it’s difficult to get actual customers to leave you a review or tell you what they think about your product or service. After all, you earn money from their purchase which makes it a little more difficult for them to admit that they were wrong about something or that your product/service is bad. This is where the importance of having a no-feedback policy on your WordPress website lies. If you don’t disable the feedback feature on your WordPress website, then you’ll be forced to deal with critical reviews or poor-quality feedback at the end of every single day. This is especially the case if you’re a small business owner who simply can’t afford to take the time to reply to every single comment that comes their way. So, if you want to keep your sanity while also maintaining a professional online presence, then it might be a good idea to consider implementing a no-feedback policy on your WordPress website.

Fortunately, it’s not as difficult as you’d think to implement a no-feedback policy on your WordPress website. You simply have to follow a few steps whereby you can prevent critical reviews and inadequate feedback from being posted on your WordPress website. Keep reading for more information.

Step one: Choose a suitable theme

In order to implement a no-feedback policy on your WordPress website, you’ll have to choose a suitable theme. Since you’ll be preventing all comments from being posted on your website, you won’t be able to use anything overly flashy or distracting. Instead, you’ll want to go for a clean and simple design that isn’t too corporate or flashy. One suitable theme that serves this purpose nicely is Kaleida. Once you’ve installed the theme, you can click on the Settings tab located at the top right-hand corner of the screen to view the theme’s options.

From here, you can configure a variety of settings relating to the theme, including comments, displays, and SEO.

Step two: Ensure that your site is checked for malware

Next on the checklist is ensuring that your website is checked for malware. The reason for this step is that it’s highly unlikely that you’ll be able to implement a no-feedback policy on your WordPress website if it’s been hacked or infected with malicious code. This is why you need to make sure that your site is safe, meaning that it doesn’t contain any malware or malicious code that could potentially harm your website’s functionality or compromise your users’ personal information. Unfortunately, there are thousands of hacker tools out there that could be used to gain access to your personal information or that of your customers. It’s also possible for hackers to use these malicious tools to damage your site’s functionality or render it completely unusable. In these instances, you’d have no choice but to start from scratch once the issue is resolved.

Step three: Choose a suitable hosting plan

Once you’ve checked that your site is malware-free and functioning properly, it’s time to move on to the next step which is choosing a suitable hosting plan. As mentioned, once you’ve implemented a no-feedback policy on your WordPress website, you won’t be able to leave comments or engage with users in any way. This means that you’ll have to host the site on your own server which, in turn, will require you to choose a suitable hosting plan. Fortunately, the process of finding a suitable hosting plan is straightforward and you can use reputable hosting companies to help you out. Some of the most popular and highly-rated hosting companies include Bluehost, WP Engine, and Hostinger. Keep in mind, however, that the price for hosting plans from these companies starts at around $2.95 per month which is cheaper than the cost of typical shared hosting plans offered by lesser-known hosting companies.

Step four: Configure your.htaccess file

Now that you have a suitable theme and a hosting plan in place, it’s time to move on to the last step which is configuring your.htaccess file. Essentially, the.htaccess file is a configuration file that sits in the root directory of your website and it allows you to tweak a variety of settings relating to the hosting plan you selected. Since you won’t have the option of leaving comments or engaging with users on your WordPress website, it’s important that you ensure that all authentication requests are handled efficiently and without any glitches. In other words, you want to make sure that all login attempts are successfully intercepted and that unauthorized users are unable to access your website without having the correct credentials. This is why you’ll want to check that the basic.htaccess configuration is enabled and perform some minor tweaking in order to get the most out of it. Some of the things you might want to change are:

• Make sure that the User ID and Password for your WordPress account are not displayed in the.htaccess file (they’re not visible when viewing the configuration file so no one will know your login details)
• Check that SSL is enabled (Secure Sockets Layer) — this is a protocol that allows your site to communicate with bank and credit card companies in a secure manner
• Change the.htaccess file’s permissions to 644 (these are the settings for a non-administrator user)
• Check that the Allow Overrule file exists (this is a security setup that allows you to replace the.htaccess file’s content with content from another location)
• Remove all www addresses from your host’s DNS records (these are the IP addresses that your site will be pulled from when a user accesses your site via the web — for example, www.example.com or simply example.com)

Step five: Test your implementation

Now that you’ve finished configuring your.htaccess file, it’s time to test your implementation. To do this, simply navigate to the root directory of your installed WordPress website and click on the Files tab located at the top right-hand corner of the screen. From here, you can download a free copy of Ahrefs Security Checker (a tool that checks for security vulnerabilities in your site) or, if you’ve hosted your site on your own server, you can access its logs directly from here.

Once you’ve downloaded the tool, simply run it and click on the Scan button. This will start the scan process which will take some time to finish. Once the scan process is complete, you can click on the View Report button to view the results of the scan.

If everything is working as expected, then great! You’ve successfully disabled the comment functionality on your WordPress website.

However, if you’re still experiencing issues with the comment section not functioning properly even though you’ve followed the steps above, then there’s a chance that you’ve missed something. It might be a good idea to re-read the complete guide in its entirety just to be sure that you haven’t overlooked or missed anything.