How to Disable Trackbacks and Pingbacks in WordPress

Disable Trackbacks and pings in WordPress

Do you want to get rid of all those spammy trackbacks and pingbacks on your blog posts? Do you want to disable trackbacks and pingbacks in WordPress? If so, you might want to stick with this article. We, today will be learning how you can easily disable trackbacks and pings.

WordPress provides you a ton of awesome features and one among them that is enabled by default is to allow websites to send and receive trackbacks and pingbacks. Trackbacks and Pingbacks allow blogs to notify each other that they have been linked to a post. So basically, this is a method for altering other sites that you have linked to them.

Unfortunately, most of them are pure spam, so it will be best if you just disable them entirely from your WordPress settings.

So, without any further ado, let’s learn about trackbacks and pingbacks and how you can disable them from your WordPress dashboard.v


Trackbacks and Pingbacks 


Trackbacks are a method of notification between websites. If another website links to one of your articles, they can manually send you a trackback to let you know. On the other hand, pingbacks are also a notification system between websites. You can think of them as remote comments.

Trackbacks can only be created manually and they contain an excerpt of the blog post, whereas pingbacks are automated, exclusive to WordPress and they usually don’t send any content.

Trackbacks and pingbacks sure are useful tools, however, the downside to trackbacks and pingbacks would be as mentioned earlier the huge level of spam you’ll see. You’ll see people pushing their own websites by using your website to propel their own sites. They do this by adding their site’s URL to other websites and it’s their attempt to push their site for search engine optimization. People add links and have good intentions but it becomes spam central because they are submitting URLs to thousands of sites. That is why it is better if you disable the pingbacks and trackbacks on your website.

Now having said that, let’s take a look at how to disable trackbacks and pingbacks in WordPress for all new and existing articles.


Disable Trackbacks and Pingbacks for all Upcoming Articles 


To disable trackbacks and pingbacks in WordPress for all the upcoming articles, go to your WordPress dashboard and click on Settings > Discussion.

Setting Discussion

Now, uncheck Allow link notifications from other blogs on new articles.

And that’s it, you’re done! You have disabled all the trackbacks and pingbacks for all your upcoming new articles.

Now let’s learn how to disable trackbacks and pingbacks on the existing WordPress posts.


Disable Trackbacks and Pingbacks from Existing WordPress Posts 


First, you need to visit Posts > All Posts page and click on the Screen Options button at the top right corner of the screen. Now enter 999 next to Number of items per page option and then click on Apply button. This will reload the post’s list and it will now show up to 999 posts on the same page.

Screen options

After that, you need to select all posts by checking the box next to the Title label.

Check title label

Then, select Edit from Bulk Action drop down and click on the Apply button.

Bulk action edit apply

WordPress will now show you a bulk edit box of all the posts on the page selected. There, you need to look for the pings option and change it to ‘Do not allow’.

Finally, click on the Update button.

Pings do not allow and update

Now you have successfully disabled all the trackbacks and pingbacks on your existing WordPress blog posts.

If you have more than 999 posts on your website, then you need to go to the next page and repeat the process.

We hope this article helped you disable trackbacks and pingbacks in WordPress for both future and existing WordPress posts.

If you have anything to share, please drop your comments below. We’d love to hear from you.

 

2 thoughts on “How to Disable Trackbacks and Pingbacks in WordPress

  1. PHPNinja says:

    Hey, thank you! This is a very useful information =) WordPress is like a huge universe and I feel we need to learn something new everyday… Actually, lots of new things everyday! So thank u for this post.

    Reply
  2. Bettina says:

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