Disable Trackbacks and Pingbacks in WordPress

Trackbacks and Pingbacks can be abused for spam and even DDOS attacks.

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.

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.

Or if you’re able to access the MySQL server with phpMyAdmin or a MySQL CLI you can run this SQL statement.

-- Globally disable pingbacks/trackbacks for all users
UPDATE wp_posts SET ping_status = 'closed'

Don’t be confused by the column name wp_posts it also contains pages.

After completing these 3 steps, you should have no more trackbacks or pingbacks on your WordPress site.