WordPress Comments are a necessity to keep your visitors lively and interactive with the website. However, there may be some situations where you need to delete all WordPress comments in bulk. Deleting them one by one could be very time-consuming, especially if you have a bigger website. Even if not, it is probably better to follow some shortcuts instead of spending hours on removing comments. So, We have the solution for you to delete all WordPress comments at once.
Why would you want to remove all the comments?
- You are moving away from the native WordPress comment system to a third-party solution.
- All of your comments are spam or doesn’t add value to your websites.
- You just need a fresh start to your blog.
- Even after removing the posts, the comments stayed for some reason. So you want to remove them as well.
Before continuing, keep in mind that, once you remove your comments, they will not be recoverable unless you have taken a backup. So, only remove them if you are absolutely sure that you will no longer need them.
Methods to remove comments on WordPress at once
There are multiple methods you can follow to get rid of WordPress comments all at once. You do not have to go through the pain of individually removing them.
Method 1. Use the default comments page
WordPress comes with a basic comment management dashboard. All you have to do to delete all of your comments is –
- Navigate to the Comments section from the left sidebar.
- If you have too many comments, you might want to change the number of comments displayed at a time –
- Click on Screen Options at the top of the screen.
- Change the number of comments to up to 200 per page. Even though you can set it up to 999, you will probably face some errors due to some limits. If you are still facing errors, reduce the number even further.
- Click on the checkbox at the title row. It will select all the comments displayed on the screen.
- From the first drop-down selection above the title row, select Move to Trash bulk action.
- Click Apply. It will move all your comments to the trash.
- Navigate to the trash and click on the Empty Trash button. It will remove all the comments forever.
Keep in mind that, if you have more than 200 comments, you will have to repeat the process until it’s done. If you don’t want to go through all these, just use a plugin as mentioned in the next step.
Method 2. Using a plugin
Probably the easiest way to remove all the comments would be using a WordPress plugin dedicated for that task.
- Download Delete All Comments plugin from the WordPress repository.
- Install and Activate it. You can also check out our article on installing and activating a plugin.
- Now, Navigate to Tools > Delete Comments.
- You will see the number of comments you have alongside a checkbox and a delete button.
- If you want to delete the entire comments on your WordPress website, Check the Delete all Comments checkbox and click the Delete all Button.
All of your comments will be removed now, and you can confirm it by going to the comments page on your WordPress.
Method 3. Use SQL commands
If you are familiar with SQL and its commands, you can use the following commands to clean WordPress comments.
TRUNCATE `wp_commentmeta`;
TRUNCATE `wp_comments`;Prevent future comments
Once you delete all your comments, if you want users to prevent future comments, you can do that as well. Follow our guide on disabling WordPress comments.