Is your WordPress site‘s pending comments queue spiraling out of control? Maybe a barrage of spam slipped through while your guard was down, or perhaps you forgot to moderate comments for a few months. Whatever the reason, a ballooning backlog of untended comments is a ticking time bomb.
Pending comments can bog down your WordPress site in a few ways:
- Consuming valuable storage space in your database
- Slowing down site backups and exports
- Making it difficult to manage legitimate comments
- Cluttering up your wp_comments table
- Potentially harming your SEO by wasting crawl budget
The longer you let unmoderated comments pile up, the bigger these issues become. At a certain point, it‘s not worth sifting through tens of thousands of pending comments to salvage the handful of genuine ones. You‘re better off purging them all and starting over with a clean slate.
If you‘re ready to clear out your pending comments queue, you‘ve come to the right place. In this guide, I‘ll walk you through exactly how to bulk delete all pending comments in WordPress. We‘ll cover a couple different methods, so you can choose the one that works best for your situation.
But first, let‘s take a closer look at the pending comments problem and why it‘s essential to address it.
Pending Comments: A Spammy Scourge
Did you know that 85% of all comments on WordPress sites are spam? That equates to a whopping 53 million spam comments per month!
While anti-spam plugins can intercept the vast majority of spammy comments, some invariably sneak through to the pending queue. And their numbers add up quickly – a site that gets just 50 pending spam comments per day will accrue over 1,500 in a single month. Yikes.
Here are a few more eye-opening WordPress comment spam statistics:
| Statistic | Value |
|---|---|
| Percentage of WordPress comments that are spam | 85% |
| Number of websites that use the Akismet anti-spam plugin | Over 5 million |
| Number of spam comments Akismet has caught | Over 500 billion |
| Most spam comments received by a single website in one month | 1.1 million |
Sources: Kinsta, WordPress, Akismet
Wrangling thousands of junk comments is nobody‘s idea of fun, so it‘s understandable to want to bulk delete them and move on. Let‘s look at how to mass purge pending comments in WordPress.
Method 1: Bulk Delete Pending Comments via the Admin Area
The easiest way to eradicate a accumulation of pending comments is straight from the WordPress admin dashboard. This method works well if you have a few thousand or fewer comments.
Here‘s how to bulk delete pending comments from the Comments screen:
From your WordPress dashboard, go to Comments and click the Pending tab. This will display all comments currently pending moderation.
If you have more than a handful of pending comments, you‘ll want to increase the number shown per page. To do this, click Screen Options at the top right and enter a higher number in the Number of items per page field (e.g. 500). This will help you delete more comments faster.
Select the checkbox at the top of the comments list to select all comments on the current page.
From the Bulk actions dropdown, choose Move to Trash.
Click Apply to send the selected comments to the trash.
If you have additional pages of comments, repeat steps 3-5 on each page until the pending queue is empty.
Voila! Your pending comments have been banished to the trash. Note that trashed comments are not deleted permanently right away. By default, they‘ll linger in the trash for 30 days before being auto-deleted.
If you want to delete the trashed comments immediately to reclaim the database space, simply click the Trash link at the top of the Comments screen and then click the Empty Trash button. Confirm the action to remove the comments permanently.
This manual method works great for giving your pending queue a quick cleaning. But if you‘re staring down a five-figure backlog, you‘ll need to bring out the big guns. That‘s where a bulk delete plugin comes in handy.
Method 2: Bulk Delete Pending Comments with a Plugin
When you need to delete truly massive numbers of pending comments, a plugin can help you get the job done more efficiently. My go-to is the free Delete Pending Comments plugin.
Here‘s how to cut through even the most colossal pending comments backlog with Delete Pending Comments:
Install and activate the plugin from the WordPress Plugin Directory.
Go to Comments > Delete Pending Comments in your WordPress dashboard.
Note the number of pending and spam comments the plugin has detected.
Paste the provided confirmation text into the text box and click Delete Pending Comments.
The plugin will now permanently delete all pending and spam comments directly from your WordPress database (no trash step). You should see a success message indicating the number of comments removed.
Keep in mind that deleting comments with this plugin is irreversible, so make sure you really want to trash them all! I recommend doing a complete WordPress backup before proceeding just in case you need to restore the deleted comments later.
Tips for Keeping Pending Comments Under Control
Cleaning out your pending comments queue is important, but it‘s even better to prevent truckloads of spammy comments from piling up in the first place. Here are a few tips for maintaining a squeaky clean pending comments queue:
Use a reputable anti-spam plugin like Akismet or Anti-Spam by CleanTalk to automatically filter out the majority of spam comments. Make sure to empty the spam queue regularly to keep your database lean.
Close comments on older posts. You can automatically disable comments on posts older than X days using a plugin like Disable Comments.
Delete pending comments on a set schedule (e.g. weekly) so they don‘t accumulate. The manual method we covered earlier works great for this.
Enable comment moderation for all new commenters. You can configure this under Settings > Discussion.
Consider implementing a CAPTCHA or similar challenge to weed out bots. I‘m a fan of reCAPTCHA by BestWebSoft.
By being proactive about comment moderation, you can keep your pending queue manageable and save yourself the headache of mass deleting thousands of junk comments down the line.
Level Up Your WordPress Maintenance
In addition to staying on top of comment moderation, optimizing your WordPress database is another key aspect of site maintenance. After mass deleting comments, it‘s smart to clean up any orphaned metadata and revision records to keep your database streamlined.
I recommend using a WordPress database optimization plugin like WP-DBManager or Advanced Database Cleaner to handle this. You can also optimize database tables manually via phpMyAdmin if you‘re comfortable doing so.
For more ways to keep your WordPress site in tip-top shape, check out my guide on XX Essential WordPress Maintenance Tasks. Your site will thank you!
Wrapping Up
Clearing out a swollen pending comments queue may not be glamorous, but it‘s key for keeping your WordPress site running smoothly. By following the steps in this tutorial, you now know how to bulk delete all pending comments in WordPress – both manually via the admin area and automatically with a plugin.
Remember: regular comment moderation is your friend! By enabling anti-spam tools, closing comments on old posts, and cleaning out the pending queue on a schedule, you can prevent spam comments from taking over your site.
Here‘s to a comment section that‘s a joy to manage. Happy moderating!
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