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How to Notify Users When Their Comment is Approved in WordPress

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Do you want to notify users when their comment is approved in WordPress?

By default, WordPress doesn’t notify users when you publish their comment. This can leave visitors wondering whether you’ve received their comment, or whether you plan to publish it at all.

In this article, we will show you how to notify users when you approve their comment.

How to notify users when their comment is approved in WordPress

Why Notify Users When Their Comment is Approved in WordPress

Comments allow your website visitors to communicate with you and other readers.

They are a great way to get engagement and feedback, and can help build a community around your WordPress blog.

By default, WordPress puts all new comments into a moderation queue. You can see these comments in the admin area, but they won’t appear on your website until you approve them.

Approving comments in the WordPress admin area

Comment moderation is the best way to keep discussions safe and spam free. However, by default WordPress doesn’t notify users when you approve their comment.

Instead, visitors would need to keep checking your site to see whether their comment has appeared. Most commenters will forget to do that. Sometimes, visitors may even assume that you’ve rejected their comment if they don’t get a notification.

By confirming that you’ve published their comment, you can encourage visitors to come back to your WordPress website. This is great for engagement and can create a more interesting and lively discussion.

With that being said, let’s see how to notify users when you approve their comment.

How to Notify Users When Their Comment Is Approved in WordPress

The easiest way to notify people when you publish their comment is by using Comment Approved Notifier Extended. This plugin is simple to set up and lets you send a custom email to your users.

First, you’ll need to install and activate the plugin. If you need help, then please see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, the plugin works automatically. Every time you approve a comment, WordPress will send a notification to that person’s email address.

A comment approval notification email

If you want to change the email’s content, then simply click on Comment Approved in the WordPress dashboard.

You will now see the default email and all of the different pieces of shortcode that you can use in your message.

How to notify users when their comment is approved in WordPress

When it creates an email, Comment Approver Notification will replace the shortcode with real information. For example, it will replace [commentauthor] with the name the person typed into your WordPress website.

You can either type or paste any shortcode into the small email editor. You can also type in plain text, as you can see in the following image.

Adding shortcode to a comment approval email

When you’re happy with how the email looks, you can simply go ahead and click on the ‘Update’ button.

Now Comment Approver Notification will send the new email to your users.

Email is an important way to communicate with your visitors, users, and customers. With that in mind, it’s a good idea to use an SMTP plugin to improve email deliverability and keep your comment notifications out of the spam folder.

WP Mail SMTP is the best WordPress SMTP plugin on the market. It allows you to easily use any SMTP server to send WordPress emails safely and reliably.

To learn more, see our guide on how to fix WordPress not sending emails.

We hope this article helped you learn how to notify users when their comment is approved in WordPress. You can also go through our guide on how to create an email newsletter and our expert pick of the best live chat software for small businesses.

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Editorial Staff

Editorial Staff at WPBeginner is a team of WordPress experts led by Syed Balkhi with over 16 years of experience in WordPress, Web Hosting, eCommerce, SEO, and Marketing. Started in 2009, WPBeginner is now the largest free WordPress resource site in the industry and is often referred to as the Wikipedia for WordPress.

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Reader Interactions

14 CommentsLeave a Reply

  1. Syed Balkhi says

    Hey WPBeginner readers,
    Did you know you can win exciting prizes by commenting on WPBeginner?
    Every month, our top blog commenters will win HUGE rewards, including premium WordPress plugin licenses and cash prizes.
    You can get more details about the contest from here.
    Start sharing your thoughts below to stand a chance to win!

  2. Mrteesurez says

    I really appreciate this post.
    I have been trying to solve this issue times ago. Now that I discovered this, I will try the plugin today.

    WPbeginner has really done great works, which some of us are just discovering including me.

    • WPBeginner Support says

      There is, however that would require some coding which would be less beginner friendly than we would like this article to be :)

      Admin

  3. Jeannette Paladino says

    This is good advice and I will pass this on to my blogging friends who do not have a method to respond to comments. Another option is to purchase ($67 single site) CommentLuv Premium plugin. The blog owner is notified when a comment is posted so s/he can reply. The plugin encourages the visitor to leave comments on future posts because for each comment a link is provided back to the commenter’s latest blog post.

  4. Mark says

    I know this is slightly different, but I find when commenting via jetpack (I think it was) I have no onscreen feedback as to whether my comment was submitted, nor do I see any “awaiting moderation”. I recently found out they are receiving the comments and I thought the comment form was broken…

  5. Chris says

    That’s crazy that this topic would come up just now. I was just thinking about this last week when I enabled comments in one of my themes. Thanks WPB

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