One of the great WordPress features you will find extremely useful is the built-in commenting system. Comments will be one of the primary ways for your visitors to interact with you or with each other. They can share their feedback, recommendations, praises, or even disagreements on particular topics.
Comment moderation is an integral part of the system; thus, you will be able to edit and customize them.
In the following lines, we are going to walk you through the process of adding, moderating, and deleting comments so that you can gain full control of the discussions occurring within your blog.
Your users will be able to leave comments for every Page and Post you have enabled commenting for.
For a start, let's see the perspective of your users' end. Please access any Post or Page comments are allowed for, directly from your website frontend. Beneath the Post/Page content, you will notice a comment submission form similar to the screenshot example below.
Please note that the interface of the form may vary depending on the theme you are currently using for your website. Generally, the fields and the information needed would be the same. Although, the fields marked as required will depend on the global Discussion settings, which we will review in the Configuring Comment Settings section in this guide.
When a comment is posted, it will be either directly displayed within the commenting section, or your visitors will be notified it needs to be approved first. This also depends on the Discussion settings.
All comments posted on your Posts and Pages are held within the "Comments" section. To reach it, please log into your WordPress Admin Dashboard by accessing your domain followed by "/wp-admin", i.e., "yourdomain.com/wp-admin", where "yourdomain.com" stands for your own domain name.
Once logged, please navigate through the left-hand side menu bar to Comments.
In the screenshot example above, you can see a notification displayed next to the "Comments" menu item. It indicates the number of pending comments that required approval.
Within the "Comments" section, you will find a list of all comments currently posted on your website, regardless of their status. The comments appear in historical order, where the latest comments are displayed at the top, while the oldest are shown in the bottom or on the last page.
At the top of the page, you can see a few links allowing you to list the comments sorted by their status. Each link indicates how many comments are assigned with the corresponding status.
Within the table below, you will see each comment presented in a separate row. Each row contains essential information, such as the visitor name, email address, IP address, the commented Page/Post, date of submission, and the content of the comment.
When you hover over a specific comment, you will be presented with the actions you can perform on it. Please note that depending on the current status of the comment, they may vary. We will explain each of the possible actions:
These are all moderation you can perform on your comments within the "Comments" section.
Note that you are also able to reply to visitors' comments directly from your website frontend while you are logged into your WordPress admin account. If this sounds more convenient, you may navigate to the Post/Page in question and post your reply from the Commenting section.
Whether you reply from the backend or the frontend, the result will be exactly the same.
WordPress allows you to alter the global comment settings depending on your personal needs. To locate them, please navigate through the left menu bar to Settings > Discussion.
Within the "Discussion" section, you will find various settings allowing you to control several aspects of the comments on your WordPress website. Although all settings are very intuitive and self-explanatory, we will briefly overview each section.
Within the "Avatars" section, you can control your visitors' avatars in the commenting section, as well as comment suitability for a particular audience.
When you alter the settings as per your requirements, please make sure to click on the "Save Changes" button at the bottom of the page to apply them.
By default, Comments are allowed for all your Post and Pages. If you want to disable them overall, you can do so by altering the setting reviewed in the previous section. In addition, WordPress provides much more flexibility by allowing you to set them up on per Post/Page basis.
To enable/disable comments for a specific Post or Page, please navigate through the left menu bar to Posts > All Posts or respectively to Pages > All Pages.
Within the list of Posts/Pages, please locate the desired one, hover over it and click on the "Quick Edit" link.
Once the settings are displayed, you will notice the "Allow Comments" checkbox. Please tick (enable) or respectively untick (disable) it depending on your intention.
When ready, make sure to click on the "Update" button to apply the change. With this, your job is done.
To sum up, in this tutorial, you have learned how to moderate the comments submitted on your Posts and Pages and how to reply to your visitors. You also know how to configure the comment settings globally applicable to your WordPress website. As well as how to enable or disable comments for individual Pages and Posts. We hope the topic discussed in this tutorial was interesting to you, and you have mastered new handy skills.
Sebahat is a young and bright woman who has become an invaluable part of our team. She started as a Customer Care Representative, mastering that role and, along the way, growing into a tech-savvy individual who is well acquainted with every support layer of the company. Driven by her aim to improve our customers’ experience constantly, she is committed to enhancing the extraordinary support we deliver.