This next plugin, I will warn you right now, WordPress is displaying that “This plugin hasn’t been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.”

Sooo... depending on your comfort-zone on trying this step, you can skip this or continue, as I felt comfortable in trying this because I had my website all backed up and ready to restore if necessary. Oh... and, when I conducted a search for this plugin, I had to scroll down the search results on the “Add Plugins” page to find it too..

Once you have installed and activated this plugin, look down the left-hand sidebar of your WordPress Dashboard... under Tools, you will see “Remove Pingback-Trackback Comments”, click on it...

Everyone should have their pingbacks and trackbacks option under Settings >Discussion Settings > second option under Default article settings unchecked... right? If not, this is a good reminder to do this.

Though my test website has no pingbacks or trackbacks, I will show you what to expect.

Now, on the Remove Pingback-Trackback Comments page, all you will need to do is click on the blue “Perform changes” button...

...then click on the OK button of the prompt shown in the screen print above... and VOILA, your pingbacks will disappear!

I choose to ignore the suggestion for the internal comments counter for each post because I could find no mention of that in the WP-Optimize plugin list of items that needed cleaning/deleting.

Now, you can go back to your plugins... to this plugin, deactivate and delete it, as you have no further use for it at this point in time. I pray it will continue to exist... but, maybe not.

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