How to Enable Comments on Your Site

There are three places to check to be sure comments are enabled on your posts:

1. In Settings > Discussion, be sure the box is checked to allow comments on new articles
   • Make sure the box for "Automatically close comments on posts older than" is off
2. In Genesis > Theme Settings > Comments & Trackbacks, be sure the box is checked to allow comments on posts
   • Note: we recommend disabling trackbacks
3. On the individual post's editor screen
4. Perfmatters, make sure "Disable comments" is not enabled

Jump to:

• Specific posts
• Enable comments on all posts
• Genesis Bug (v 3+)
• Remove the Websites Field

Specific posts

When the comments are disabled for a specific post, there's a couple places to check:

• Look for Screen Options in the very top right of the screen and click to open the toggle
• Check the Discussion box, then click Screen Options again to close the toggle
• Scroll below the editor box and be sure the box is checked to allow comments

You may need to do that for all your posts if the comment form doesn't display. The Settings > Discussion and individual post settings are default WordPress behavior, while the Genesis > Theme Settings is specific to Genesis.

Our themes don't alter or modify the comment settings in WordPress.

One final place to check is the Admin > Settings > Discussion screen in WordPress and make sure the "Automatically close comments on articles older than 14 days" is not checked: 

Enable comments on all posts

You can use the WP Optimize plugin to enable comments on all posts.

While there, we also recommend disabling trackbacks on all posts.

Note that this plugin has a lot of overlapping functionality that WP Rocket, and because of that, we don't recommend using any other features, or support leaving WP Optimize enabled.

Genesis Bug (v 3+)

In Genesis 3+, We've seen the comments form disappearing from posts/pages without site admins performing any actions, and this has been traced back to a Genesis bug. If you run into the issue, it can be resolved by going to Customize > Theme Settings > Comments and Trackbacks then:

1. disable comments
2. hit publish
3. enable comments
4. hit publish

This refreshes the setting that tells Genesis to display the comments on posts/pages.

Remove the Websites Field

The "websites" field of the comments encourage spam, and should be removed from your site. Even for legitimate comments, the website that users link to are generally not topically relevant, and don't provide any benefit to your readers.

We've added this feature to the Feast Plugin! See: Remove the website field from comments form