Everything You Need to Know About WordPress Pingbacks

Pingback in WordPress refers to an automated system that will notify you if someone links to one of your blog posts from their website. This notification comes in the form of a comment under the same blog post linked to on your site.

Basically, pingbacks are WordPress’ way of telling website owners, “Hey, someone linked to your blog post.” One of the great things about pingbacks is that they are completely automated. Keep in mind that while pingbacks do send back excerpts along with links to articles, excerpts typically do not appear in comments on most topics.

How to Enable and Disable WordPress Pingbacks

Pingbacks are not for everyone. Some people like them and others don't. Luckily, WordPress allows you to easily enable or disable pingbacks.

After logging into your WordPress admin dashboard, go to Settings > Discussions from the navigation menu. You should see something like the image below.

The first two options are for sending and receiving pingbacks. If you check the first option, your own blog will try to send a pingback. If you check the second option, other blogs will reply to you.

If you don't want to send pingbacks, uncheck the first box. If you don't want to receive pingbacks, uncheck the second box. Uncheck them to disable pingbacks entirely.

Remember that any changes you make to these options will only apply to new posts. The settings for old posts will remain unchanged.

Enable or disable Pingbacks for individual posts

The admin dashboard allows you to set site-wide rules to enable or disable pingbacks. However, there may be times when you just want to disable or enable pingbacks for a specific post. Is that possible? certainly.

The quickest way is to navigate to Posts > All Posts from your WordPress admin dashboard and then hover over any post title in the entire list of posts. This will display a submenu below the hovered post.

Click the button titled Quick Edit and you will see a bunch of options there. The option to allow pingbacks is on the right as shown in the image below. Uncheck the option to disable pingbacks for this specific post.

You can also find the option to allow pingbacks and trackbacks on the main edit screen of a specific post on the right. It will be located in the sidebar menu on the right side of the editing screen. You may need to scroll down a bit to see it. Here is a screenshot of the options for one of my posts.

How to disable self-ping

One unexpected behavior you may notice when pinging is enabled is that you will occasionally receive pingbacks from posts on your blog. While this is a great way to achieve better cross-linking between posts, some users also find it annoying.

The secret to disabling these self-pings while keeping others' pings active is to use a shortened form of the URL when linking to posts on your own site. The pingback function is triggered when the URL contains https:// at the beginning. However, this can be easily avoided when linking to your own post. For example, the URL https://my-website.com/my-recent-trip/ will become /my-recent-trip/.

Final Thoughts

This tutorial covers all the basics you need to know about WordPress pingbacks. You should now be able to enable or disable WordPress pingbacks at the site level as well as at the individual post level.

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