Your website’s comments section allows visitors to share their opinions and discuss your content. If you have enabled comments, use the information in this guide to view, reply to, delete, and manage comments.
In this guide
Video Transcript
I wanted to take a look at basic functionality around comments. So comments on your site allow other users or readers to basically talk to you about the content that you’re creating on your site.
There’s a section within my home on that left sidebar that you can jump to. And so there’s functionality built in you can enable and manage, And then you’re also gonna have kind of ability to moderate because the internet’s a crazy place. Sometimes people just comment anywhere they can with links trying to drive traffic to different places. They’ll comment with things that are totally irrelevant. So we have some spam protection built in for that, which is nice and you don’t have to worry too much about that, but that means that you also need to kind of go in here and check on what comments are there and which are valid so you can approve them respond to them and all that good stuff.
So let’s go into… actually, let’s first go into settings and let’s check out there’s a discussion section in here that’ll give you some options.
So I’m gonna click on discussion again and so this is gonna give you a lot of the options to enable comments and control how they work on there. So notify any blogs that you link from your articles so it’ll send somebody else if you put a link to somebody else’s content it’ll let them know that you link to them. That’s a great way to get them to share your content to their audience and a great way to help build your following. Link notifications from other blogs, meaning if other people are linking to your content, you can get a notification about it and do the same thing. That’s a great way to build a community with other content creators and not just your readers. That’ll help all of you kind of build a symbiotic community of readers that maybe are overlapping in topics that you cover, even though they’re slightly different. They kind of are interested in both, or multiple kind of places where they might overlap.
And then you can of course allow people to post comments on your new content. You can let visitors use a .com, Twitter, Facebook, or Google account to comment. I should probably actually have that enabled. It’s fine with me.
And then there’s all these other settings you can require.
So the comment author needs to fill out their name and email, that helps prevent some of the spam.
They must be registered and logged into your site to comment. I don’t have that one enabled because I don’t think they should have to create a whole account just to enjoy the content and engage with it.
You can close out comments that you haven’t responded to or approved after a certain amount of time.
So there’s a bunch of settings in here to kind of control that commenting experience. We don’t need to go through all of them one by one. What I really wanted to make sure is you knew that those are there.
And then we can jump over to the actual comments section of the site. And this is just where you’re going to see essentially all the comments, which are pending and need approval, which have been approved.
So if I had gone through and said, yeah, this is fine, it would be live, that’s fine, which were caught as spam and marked as spam, and then which ones you kind of deleted or threw away already.
So you get a full history to manage all that in there. And if you’re actually publishing content on your site, which I haven’t been, and you’re actively engaging and sharing your site, you’ll get a lot more of this happening.
Sometimes it happens through the reader. If you go to wordpress.com/read, you can see a bunch of our other kind of customer sites and content as it comes through, and even subscribe to them there and comment from there.
Sometimes it just happens as people find your site and your content as you share it across social media or if they find it on a search engine.
So people can come from anywhere and discover it, comment it, and start a discussion. It’s a great way to kind of engage and build loyalty with your audience and connect with the people on the other side of it.
As the site owner, you are in complete control of the comments left on your site. You can view and reply to comments by visiting the post or page directly.
To view and manage comments from your site’s admin area:
- Visit your site’s dashboard.
- Click on Comments in the options on the left, as highlighted below:
The number next to “Comments” in your dashboard notes pending comments you have yet to approve (if you have set comments to be manually approved in your Discussion settings.)
At the top of the Comments screen, you can view all comments or select from several tabs:
- Pending: Comments made by visitors to your site, but you have not yet approved to appear on your site. These are highlighted in yellow to make them easy to spot.
- Approved: Comments left by visitors to your site that you have approved to appear on your site.
- Spam: Comments marked as spam.
- Trash: Comments you have deleted.
You can sort by newest or oldest comments and access Bulk Edit mode. Click the cog ⚙️ icon to reveal an option to “Collapse replied comments” so that comments you’ve already replied to appear minimized, making it easier to view comments you have yet to reply to.
For each comment, you can take the following actions in the Comments area of your dashboard:
- Approve the comment to appear on your site.
- Mark the comment as spam.
- Send the comment to Trash to delete it.
- Like the comment to show your appreciation.
- Edit the comment text.
- Reply to the comment.
- View “User Info” to see the commenter’s name, details, and an option to block them from commenting again.
Click on the Bulk Edit button in the top right corner of Comments to enable the Bulk Edit mode:
Click anywhere on a comment to select it, then perform actions on all selected comments simultaneously. The actions are:
- Approve or Unapprove the selected comments from appearing on your site.
- Mark selected comments as Spam.
- Send the selected comments to Trash to delete them.
The number at the top of the screen indicates how many comments you have selected:
If your site has a lot of comments, it can be helpful to search through all of your site’s comments to find a specific comment you’re looking for.
These instructions are referring to the WP-Admin interface. To view this interface, click the View tab in the upper right corner and select Classic view.
To search through your comments, follow these steps:
- Click on Comments in your dashboard.
- Using the search box at the top of the screen, you can search by keyword, the commenter’s name, or the commenter’s IP address.
From time to time, you may receive unwanted comments on your website.
There are many ways to protect your WordPress.com site from unwanted comments:
- You can control whether comments are automatically approved or must be reviewed before publication. This makes sure no comment is visible on your site without your approval.
- You can add rules for comment moderation to control which comments get marked as pending approval.
- You can add rules to the disallowed comments section to automatically mark some comments as spam.
- If you turn on email notifications, you can watch those messages for spam and delete them quickly if you find any that get through the comment spam filter.
All WordPress.com sites are protected by the Akismet comment spam filter, which automatically marks spam comments for you. If you notice that your comments are incorrectly marked as spam, please contact our Akismet support and mention that Akismet is catching your comments by mistake.
