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How to disable the compare products function in Magento

By default, Magento has a function that allows customers to compare products in the catalog. If you want to, you can turn off the product comparison function by making a few modifications. On the frontend of your Magento site there are a couple of blocks connected with product comparison: Compare Products sidebar and Recently Compared Products. In addition to this, on the product list pages and on the product details pages there are Add to Compare links.

You can remove the sidebars related to product comparison by using a local.xml file. For more information on how to do this check out the tutorial on removing blocks and elements in Magento that cannot be removed from the admin panel.

You can hide the Add to Compare links by editing the styles.css file of your theme. For example, if you use the default theme that comes prepackaged with Magento and the application is installed directly in the public_html directory on your Magento hosting account, the path to the file on your account will be public_html/skin/default/default/css/styles.css. Edit the file and add the following line:

.link-compare { display:none; }

You can do that from the Files section of the Pixie control panel, or you can download the file with an FTP client (e.g. FileZilla), edit it with a text editor (e.g. Notepad, Wordpad) and upload it back overwriting the old file. After that flush the Magento cache and the browser cache, and refresh the frontend of your site.

Note that instead of modifying the CSS files of the original theme, its preferable to create a subtheme of that theme, switch the default theme to the subtheme and edit the files of the subtheme. For more information on how to do that read the article on creating a child theme in Magento.

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