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How to Easily Disable Blog Features in WordPress

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Do you want to disable the blog features in WordPress?

WordPress is the world’s most popular blogging platform, but not every website needs a blog. By disabling unnecessary blogging features, you can make the admin area easier to understand, even for new WordPress users.

In this article, we will show you how to easily disable blog features in WordPress without writing any code.

How to easily disable blog features in WordPress

Why Disable Blog Features in WordPress?

If you’re looking to start a blog, then WordPress is the best blogging platform. As a WordPress blogger, you’ll be in good company as many big-name brands use WordPress for their blog.

However, not every website needs a blog. For example, you might be building an online store, a membership website, or an online portfolio, and have no plans to write blog posts.

While you can build a WordPress website without using any of the blogging features, they’ll still be visible in the admin area.

The default WordPress blogging dashboard

If you don’t need them, then hiding the WordPress blogging features can make the admin area easier to navigate and understand.

This is particularly important if you’re working with other people, especially if they’re new to WordPress. For example, if you’re designing a membership website for a client who is unfamiliar with WordPress, then all of the blogging features can be confusing.

With that in mind, let’s see how you can easily disable blog features in WordPress.

How to Change the WordPress Homepage

By default, WordPress shows your blog posts on the homepage.

Before you disable the blogging features, you’ll need to select a new static homepage for your WordPress website. For example, if you’re building a small business website then you might create a page that displays your most popular products.

To help you build the perfect homepage, please see our guide on how to edit a WordPress homepage effectively.

Once you’re happy with the page’s design, you can tell WordPress to use it as your homepage by going to Settings » Reading. Here, select the box next to ‘A static page.’

How to change the WordPress homepage

Then, open the ‘Homepage’ dropdown and choose a page from the list.

After that, don’t forget to click on ‘Save changes’ to store your settings.

Using a static page as your WordPress homepage

Disabling Blog Features in WordPress

The best way to hide blogging features in the WordPress admin area is by using Disable Blog. This plugin hides the ‘post’ type plus all blog-related admin pages and settings.

If you’ve already written some posts, created categories and tags, or got some comments from readers, then Disable Blog will hide this content without deleting it.

If you change your mind at any point, then you can restore all of this content by either deactivating or deleting the Disable Blog plugin.

Upon activation, the plugin automatically removes the ‘Post’ settings from the left-hand menu and your admin toolbar. If you have any post-related widgets, then these will also be removed from the WordPress admin dashboard.

How to disable blogging features in the WordPress dashboard

It also hides all the categories and tags, as long as they’re not used by a custom post type.

If you’re displaying the comment count in WordPress, then Disable Blog will also update the count to remove any comments left on your blog posts.

You may have noticed that the plugin doesn’t hide the ‘Comments’ settings. This is because you can allow visitors to comment on an individual page by finding the ‘Discussion’ settings in the right-hand menu.

Then, simply check the box next to ‘Allow comments.’

Allowing comments on a WordPress page

If you want to disable comments completely, then please see our guide on how to completely disable comments in WordPress.

We hope this article helped you learn how to disable blog features in WordPress. You may also want to see our list of the must-have WordPress plugins for business websites, or see our guide on how to create a landing page with WordPress.

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Editorial Staff

Editorial Staff at WPBeginner is a team of WordPress experts led by Syed Balkhi with over 16 years of experience in WordPress, Web Hosting, eCommerce, SEO, and Marketing. Started in 2009, WPBeginner is now the largest free WordPress resource site in the industry and is often referred to as the Wikipedia for WordPress.

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Reader Interactions

9 CommentsLeave a Reply

  1. Syed Balkhi says

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  2. Gaurav Khurana says

    Never knew such a thing exist. That’s great but what are the possible use cases where people may need this

    • Ethan Jinks O'Sullivan says

      WordPress is much more than just a blogging platform nowadays. Many websites built off of WordPress don’t use posts, comments, feeds, or other blog-related features. As a result, these features become cumbersome.

      At its core, WordPress doesn’t offer an option to turn any of these features off. That’s where our plugin adds these settings to simplify your website for non-blogging use.

  3. Mustaasam Saleem says

    Great!

    Will it also affect the performance of a site? As we are disabling the stuff that is not required if we do not want to use WordPress as a blog.

    • Ethan Jinks O'Sullivan says

      Hi Mustaasam,

      Ethan from Fact Maven, the developers of Disable Blogging.

      To answer your question, yes. On the back-end, it removes menu items from the Dashboard’s sidebar and toolbar, removes blog-related meta boxes on the Dashboard page, and removes blog-related widgets. On the front-end, feeds, pingbacks, trackbacks, XML-RPC, Windows Live Writer, and emoji support are removed from the header.

      These are just some examples. You can see the complete list of features that are removed from the front and back end on our plugin page.

      As a result, since there less functions running, the page size is reduced, less requests are made, and the load-time is decreased. Also, since all feed related links are removed, it prevent bots from crawling your unused links.

  4. Ron Piper says

    Nice work – there are several other techniques i’ve tried over the years but it’s really cumbersome to resolve all the SEO loose ends that come up when getting rid of blogging from WP. Like having Archives indexed in google and so forth.

    • Ethan Jinks O'Sullivan says

      Thank you. If there’s any techniques that you use and our plugin doesn’t cover, please let us know on our GitHub page:

      The same goes for any suggestions to help improve our plugin.

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