Do you have a lot of pend­ing com­ments in Word­Press that you want to delete? This can eas­i­ly hap­pen if you get a lot of spam comments.

Nor­mal­ly, delet­ing com­ments in Word­Press is easy, but it gets trick­i­er when there is a large num­ber of pend­ing com­ments. You may even come across weird errors while bulk delet­ing com­ments if there are too many of them. 

In this arti­cle, we’ll show you how to eas­i­ly bulk delete all pend­ing com­ments in Word­Press, step by step. 

What Are Pending Comments in WordPress?

Pend­ing com­ments in Word­Press are the com­ments that are await­ing moderation. 

You’ll find them in the Word­Press admin area by vis­it­ing the ‘Com­ments’ page and switch­ing to the ‘Pend­ing’ tab. 

We rec­om­mend users turn on com­ment mod­er­a­tion on all their web­sites to com­bat com­ment spam. This means all com­ments on your web­site will go to the Pend­ing queue before they are approved.

Why would any­one want to delete pend­ing comments? 

There are many sce­nar­ios when you may need to do that. For instance: 

• Akismet anti-spam plu­g­in got dis­abled on your site and sud­den­ly all spam com­ments are appear­ing in pending.
• You sim­ply for­got about a web­site, and it gath­ered hun­dreds of com­ments that are no longer relevant.
• Arti­cles on your web­site gen­er­at­ing a lot of unwant­ed comments
• You for­got to turn off com­ments on old­er posts

It can take a long time to go through and mod­er­ate each com­ment indi­vid­u­al­ly. If you are con­fi­dent that there are no com­ments marked ‘pend­ing’ that you want to keep, then you can sim­ply bulk delete them all.

1. Deleting All Pending Comments in WordPress Manually

If you only have a few hun­dred pend­ing com­ments, it’s quite quick to delete them manually.

Sim­ply go to the ‘Com­ments’ page in Word­Press admin area and then click on the ‘Pend­ing’ tab to see a list of all your pend­ing comments. 

By default, this list will show 20 pend­ing com­ments at a time. To change this, click on the ‘Screen Options’ tab at the top-right cor­ner of the page. 

Next, type ‘100’ into the ‘Num­ber of items per page’ and click the Apply button:

Now that you have 100 com­ments dis­play­ing, sim­ply check the box to the left of ‘Author’ at the top of the list of com­ments. This selects all the com­ments on the page:

Then, click on the ‘Bulk actions’ drop­down and select the ‘Move to Trash’ option. Go ahead and click the Apply but­ton to move all those com­ments into the trash:

Word­Press will auto­mat­i­cal­ly show the next 100 com­ments on the page. Sim­ply repeat the process to remove these too.

When you delete any com­ment on Word­Press, it is not delet­ed right away. Instead, it is sent to the ‘Trash’ and will remain there for 30-days. After that, it will be auto­mat­i­cal­ly delet­ed permanently. 

If you would rather delete them per­ma­nent­ly right away, then you need to switch to the ‘Trash’ tab on the ‘Com­ments’ page and then click on the ‘Emp­ty Trash’ button.

You will then see a mes­sage con­firm­ing that those com­ments have been deleted: 

Note: You can use the Screen Options to show up to 999 com­ments per page. How­ev­er, this will increase the load on your Word­Press host­ing servers and slow down your site. You might also see an error mes­sage like this one when you try to move com­ments to the trash:

If you have more than a few hun­dred pend­ing com­ments, then we rec­om­mend using a plu­g­in method to delete them.

2. Deleting Large Number of Pending Comments in WordPress Using a Plugin

The quick­est way to delete a very large num­ber of pend­ing com­ments is to use a plugin.

This will delete your pend­ing (and spam) com­ments per­ma­nent­ly. We rec­om­mend mak­ing a back­up of your Word­Press site before pro­ceed­ing, just in case you change your mind later.

First, you need to install and acti­vate the Delete Pend­ing Com­ments plu­g­in. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a Word­Press plu­g­in.

Upon acti­va­tion, go to the Com­ments » Delete Pend­ing Com­ments page in your Word­Press admin. You will see a mes­sage let­ting you know how many pend­ing com­ments there are.

Note: This fig­ure includes spam com­ments, which are delet­ed at the same time as the pend­ing comments.

To delete all the pend­ing com­ments, you need to type the required line of text into the box. You can copy and paste this text if you prefer. 

After that, go ahead and click the ‘Delete Pend­ing Com­ments’ button.

You will then see a mes­sage con­firm­ing that all pend­ing and spam com­ments have been deleted.

Deleting Spam Comments Only in WordPress

What if you don’t want to delete pend­ing com­ments but just want to delete the ones that are marked as spam? That’s very easy to do in WordPress.

First, go to Com­ments in your Word­Press admin and click on the Spam tab:

Next, click the Emp­ty Spam but­ton. This will delete all spam com­ments per­ma­nent­ly, not just the ones on the cur­rent page:

We hope this arti­cle helped you learn how to delete all pend­ing com­ments in Word­Press. You may also want to see our Word­Press secu­ri­ty guide to pro­tect your web­site, or see our guide on how to allow users to report inap­pro­pri­ate com­ments in Word­Press.

If you liked this arti­cle, then please sub­scribe to our YouTube Chan­nel for Word­Press video tuto­ri­als. You can also find us on Twit­ter and Face­book.

The post How to Delete All Pend­ing Com­ments in Word­Press appeared first on WPBe­gin­ner.