To disable trackbacks and pingbacks completely on WordPress, do the following:
1. Disable for new posts
Uncheck the following setting:
Settings>Discussion>Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks)
This will disable trackbacks and pingbacks for all future posts, but not for existing posts.
2. Disable them on existing posts
- Go to your Posts page
- Click ‘Screen Options’ in the top right
- View ‘x’ number of posts value to something reasonable, based on how many posts you have
- Click the ‘Select All’ box to select all posts visible on the page
- Click ‘Edit’ from the Bulk Actions dropdown menu
- Set the ‘Pings’ dropdown to be ‘Do not allow’
This should disable them for all existing posts. Last step, pages.
3. Disable them on existing pages
Unfortunately I couldn’t find a way to do this in bulk, or via the ‘Quick Edit’ screen, so you’ll have to go through each page and manually uncheck the option under the ‘Discussion’ tab.
After completing these 3 steps, you should have no more trackbacks or pingbacks on your WordPress site.
6 thoughts on “Disable Trackbacks in WordPress”
Thank you – this is the exact information I was needing! I’ve been getting more and more ping-back spam and very few useful links, so I decided the ping-backs weren’t worth having. I’ve now disabled them on all posts using your instructions – no SQL commands required!
The only way to disable it for existing posts in bulk is via an sql query. So if you can get into your database (or via plugin) run this query:
UPDATE wp_posts SET ping_status=’closed’ WHERE post_status = ‘publish’ AND post_type = ‘post’;
UPDATE wp_posts SET ping_status=’closed’ WHERE post_status = ‘publish’ AND post_type = ‘page’;
Thanks so much for the post. Couldn’t figure out why I kept getting spam regardless of all the anti-spam plugin efforts. Cheers again!
Can’t tell you how grateful I am you posted this.
I’m really not a fan of WordPress and like many people have to maintain its vast array of pointless and broadly undocumented features for clients. While I could find various hacks and plugins all over the net, most of which did nothing, yours was the only page that detailed how individual pages might be set to allow or disallow comments even though confusingly the global options set them off.
WordPress. May it crawl away and die some day and be reborn less awful.
Thanks. Glad it helped.
Thank you!