WordPress Comments Tutorial | WP Learning Lab

WordPress Comments Tutorial

Visitors to your site are able to leave comments via the WordPress comment form (also known as the WordPress comment box) that appears on WordPress Posts and WordPress Pages by default.

At some point in the near future, if not already, your blog will get comments. At the beginning there's a good chance that a lot of those comments will be generated by commenting 'bots'. Those bots are pieces of software that are designed to leave comments on as many different sites as possible. Those are spam comments. In general you don't want to publish spam comments to your site. You can prevent a lot of the spam comments by using plugins like Akismet. Plugins that like that save a lot of manual effort in deleting spam WordPress comments.

Luckily, by default, WordPress requires an admin to approve comments before they are published to the website. This means that the spam comments won't just appear on your posts and pages.

Once your blog gains a following you will start getting more and more legitimate comments, which is great! However, by default, those will have to be manually approved as well.

Here's how to moderate the flood of comments you'll receive.

On the left side of the WordPress admin menu you will see an item called "Comments", click on it to get to the comment management area.

In that area you will see a full list of all the comments on your website (both approved and unapproved comments). The ones that have already been approved will have a white background and the ones that require your attention will have a colored background.

There are a few things you can do with comments. When you hover them you have the option to "Approve", "Reply", "Quick Edit", "Edit", "Spam", or "Trash".

These are mostly self explanatory, but I'll quickly go over them any way.

If you click Approve, you will approve WordPress comments and they are published at the bottom of the page or post where they were left.

By clicking Reply you will be able to leave a reply to WordPress comments.

If you click on Quick Edit you will be able to edit some of the contents of the WordPress comment without leaving the page.

If you click on Edit you will be taken to another page where you will be able to edit the WordPress comments.

If you mark WordPress comments as Spam AND you have Akismet installed that comment will be sent to Akismet servers and added to the list of spam comments that are automatically blocked.

If you click on "Trash" you will delete WordPress comments.

Now that we've gone over the basics, let's dig deeper in the Edit feature.

If you click on Edit you will be taken to a separate page where you can edit the comment. On that page you can edit the text of the comment which will let you fix spelling errors, grammatical errors or anything else you want.

You can change the name field of the comment. You can change the URL field of the comment and you can change the email address field of the comment.

On the edit page you can also Approve, Reply, Spam and Trash a comment.

If you do get legitimate comments you will want to leave a reply to each one even if you just say "Thanks for commenting". This will help with engagement and let people know that 'someone is home'.

I hope this information helps you! If you have any questions leave a comment below or ping me @WPLearningLab on Twitter.

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[TheDevilsGrandson]

How do I change the color of the comment? For some reason the color is set to white and the comment doesn't show up on my site.

[Hawck]

How do I add pictures/attachments to comments. Some work some don’t I get the notification: this page doesn’t seem to exist.

Can’t figure it out…

[marykuhn]

I have enabled comments on my wordpress site, but there is no comments section to populate on the website... help! I must have deleted something. I've allowed comments in the settings section and also on each post.

[kanishkasahu]

how can i build an blogging interface for users/authors in wordpress just like blogger.I am struck where a user will write its post and have some features like to make some text bold or to add bullets to text, i'm missing knowledge to add that panel.please help me.looking forward for an answer thank you in advance.

[shahwaizali]

Hi, in post the comments form not work, I enable to comment from Post from dashboard

[scoutnichols]

This may sound super silly, but when I get comments it says real big “3 thoughts on It displays my comment(s) like another post, which I don’t like. I’d rather it just say “recent comments” real small. Is there a way to change this? Maybe a plug-in? Hope this makes sense haha! Thanks in advance.

[AhmedArtsCalligraphy]

Many thanks for the video really helped, I would suggest to explain the Discussion Settings in dashboard too.

[yosofya]

what if i need to edit the heading of the comment section that says " Leave a Reply " say i want to change it to " Tell us your Thoughts " ?

[abbyscott]

I am having a problem with my comments and my opitions to comment not showing up, can you help?

[NLCC_Peoria]

I can't see my comments to approve or delete them, why? I am an administrator.

[polinadg]

Hi, is there a way to allow people to leave pictures in the comments?

[pastorhealer]

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I think that makes good sense.  I will give that a try.  It's strange that I haven't had one comment yet.  Surely I am not getting thousands of people yet.  Typically 350/mo.  But no comments...  Anyway, thanks again for taking the time...  :)

[BeyondTshirts]

Hi Bjorn!

Question - if you have a legitimate comment but it was possibly submitted to the wrong post, how can I move the comment to the correct blog post? Can that be done somehow?

I have a really decent comment but it's "In Response to" an unrelated blog post. It would fit perfectly under another one of my blog posts.

Thanks!

[umarhayyat]

I have an issue i am approved my comments but they don't shown me below the post canyou help me

[mr.bmondal]

Hello, my comment section reply button is not working. After troubleshooting I found that after deactivating yoast seo the reply button start working. Please give some solution for this to fix it

[enochyoung]

thanks for this but I want to ask, is there any way to make the comments to automatically show on your blog without manually approving it?

[ranin]

hi m y comments box wont appear despite all the ticks i did on the settings. would you be able to help?

[shareurworks]

Thanks ! That was very helpful. Is there any plugin i need to activate to receive those comments in my dashboard ?

[Flavius-Tech]

Is there any plugin notification with sounds, to hear when someone just commented on ur post?

[abbyscott]

if you delete the spam comments does google still count it ?