WordPress – How to Bulk Delete Comments Pending Moderation

In this tutorial, we will show you how to bulk delete comments pending moderation on WordPress. We’ll be able to search for all comments with “pending moderation” status and remove them in bulk.

• You may also like to read: How to Disable Post Comments by Keyword, Author, Category, or Tag

Suppose you have decided to stop receiving comments on your WordPress content, and you don’t want to have to review comments that have pending status.

To do this, you must first disable all comments on new WordPress posts. Then, you need to go to the comments section and start deleting the pending approval comments.

But what if you have thousands of comments pending review or pending approval? You will need a tool that allows you to delete thousands of comments pending approval.

Fortunately, we have that tool: the WP Sheet Editor – Comments and Reviews plugin.

With this plugin, you can save a lot of time by managing WordPress comments, product reviews and other types of comments using an intuitive spreadsheet on WordPress.

It also helps you avoid server errors because it applies bulk changes in batches.

1- View your WordPress comments in a spreadsheet

After installing and activating the WP Sheet Editor – Comments and Reviews plugin, you can open the spreadsheet by going to WP Sheet Editor > Edit Comments.

You’ll see all your comments and reviews displayed on it.

This spreadsheet allows you to edit comments fields by editing the values in the columns.

If you move to the Status column, you can see that the comments have different status:

However, to simplify the process, you can filter all the comments or reviews by status and by post type.

2- Search for all WordPress post comments pending moderation

The comment sheet will show you not only WordPress post comments, but also WooCommerce product reviews, user responses on other post types, course lesson comments, etc.

And of these different types of comments, some will have the approved status, others will have the pending moderation status, and so on.

Therefore, you need to decide what you want to remove.

In this example, we are going to remove all comments from WordPress posts with pending moderation status.

Let’s start by opening the Search tool.

Now let’s select these values in order to filter all pending comments:

• Post type: Posts (post)
• Comment status: Pending
• Comment type: Comment
• Click on Run search.

After running the search, you’ll see all the comments pending review displayed on the spreadsheet.

You can see the active search filters above the spreadsheet.

3- Bulk delete WordPress comments pending moderation

After searching for all the post comments pending moderation or review, you need to open the Bulk Edit tool and proceed to bulk remove them.

To remove pending comments in bulk, you need to select these values in the Bulk Edit tool:

• Select the rows that you want to update: Edit all the rows from my current search (including non-visible rows)
• What field do you want to edit: Status
• Select type of edit: Set value
• Replace existing value with this value: Delete completely
• Click on Execute now to delete all the pending post comments.

As you have seen, removing all pending review comments is a simple process. You just have to apply some search filters and delete all the search results.

This way, you don’t have to manually delete comments with pending status. Also, your server won’t crash because WP Sheet Editor applies bulk updates in batches.