How to mass delete comments in wordpress – spam, pending & approved

How to mass delete comments in wordpress - spam comments, approved comments, pending commentsJust create a new wordpress site and fill up with few posts and see how the comment numbers are building up day by day. The number of comments can indicate the traffic flow to your site, but don’t even get elevated by seeing those comments. Here we will discuss on how to mass delete comments in wordpress. Mass deleting pending comments, approved comments, spam comments as well as trash comments in wordpress.

Most of comments that you receive in your site are from spammers who post it on several sites using some automation software. Spam comments takes up valuable space in your site and so you have to delete it, but before that you have to prevent it. Here is a tutorial to prevent spam comments in wordpress. There we mentioned about Akismet a highly recommended wordpress plugin which clears spam comments. Any how all those spam comments occupy your valuable space until you delete it. Manually deleting huge number of comments will take lots of time, so we will see how to mass delete comments in wordpress using phpMyAdmin and by using plugin.

Have you tried this?

In your wordpress dashboard go to comments and you can see pending comments, approved comments, spam comments and trash comments. Drop down screen options and increase the view limit, now by bulk action method you can delete all the comments. The issue with this method is that you cannot delete 1000’s of comments at a time, when you do so you will end up seeing this.

Request-URI Too Large

The requested URL’s length exceeds the capacity limit for this server

How to mass delete comments in wordpress - mass deleting spam, approved, pending comments

How to mass delete wordpress comments using phpMyAdmin

  1. Login to your site cPanel and head to phpMyAdmin in database
  2. Now select your database and select wp_comments table. Know your database
  3. You can see all your comments. If you wish to delete all comments then check all and delete it.

Note: Based on your configuration database prefix may vary, we are using default prefix (wp_). Make sure to change the database prefix if you are using other than default.

How to mass delete spam comments in wordpress

Run the below query if you wish to bulk delete all the pending comments in wordpress. To run the query select SQL, paste the query and click GO.

DELETE from wp_comments WHERE comment_approved =  '0'

Run the following query if you wish to bulk delete all approved comments in wordpress

DELETE from wp_comments WHERE comment_approved =  '1'

Run the following query if you wish to bulk delete all spam comments in wordpress

DELETE from wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = 'spam'

Run the below query if you wish to bulk delete all the trash comments in wordpress

DELETE from wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = 'trash'

How to mass delete comments in wordpress using plugin

Any how the above process is bit complicated and it is not recommended for beginners. So here comes two comment plugins to mass delete your wordpress comments with just one click.

Wp Comment Cleaner – Just install and activate WpCommentCleaner plugin and delete all the comments in your wordpress site. With just one click you can delete un-approved comments, spam comments and approved comments.

How to mass delete spam comments, approved comments, un approved comments in wordpress

Delete pending comments – Here comes another plugin Delete pending comments that deletes all pending comments.

Hope this post helped you to delete mass comments in wordpress site. Please share it and feel free to comment below.