Spam is a growing problem for all websites. Often WordPress sites receive a huge number of spam comments. Thankfully there are tools to combat comment spam in WordPress, like Akismet and CAPTCHA. A few months ago, Akismet went down for a few minutes, and we saw thousands of spam comments in our moderation queue. In this article, we will show you how to quickly batch delete spam comments in WordPress.
The quickest way to delete all spam comments is by clicking the Empty Spam button in WordPress. However when deleting hundreds or thousands of comments at once, this action may take too long, and it could also take down your web server.
What we need is a nice way to handle the deletion process without causing too much burden on the server resources. Thanks to Pippin Williamson, there’s a better solution now.
All you need to do is install and activate the Batch Comment Spam Deletion plugin. There are no settings for the plugin to configure. Simply go to Comments » Spam and hit the Empty Spam button.
This plugin modifies the spam comment deletion process. Instead of deleting all spam comments at once, it processes them into batches and deletes 100 comments in a batch.
It will show you the deletion process as it goes on. Once it is done, you will be redirected to the comments page. This plugin reduces the load on your server while allowing you to swiftly clean your database from spam comments.
We hope this article helped you find a better way to delete spam comments from your WordPress site.
An effective strategy to fight spam comment bots is by using the honeypot technology, which tries to catch comment bots before they can submit any spam.
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Good advice. My problem is slightly different. The comments I need to delete are located in the “feedback” area and are not marked as spam. There are over 13,000 that contain spam, I have manually deleted 2,000 but would like a way to bulk delete them. The majority are tied to two specific posts.
My question is: Are they linked to the posts making it possible to delete the post, therefore, deleting the feedback/comments?
This plug-in just saved me from manually deleting 2,000+ comments. Thank you very much — worked like a charm.
Thank you SO much for this help. I’ve been using Akismet, but didn’t have captcha going. I suddenly realized that I had 65,000 spam comments and whenever I tried to empty spam, it crashed everything. I’m running your recommended plugin right now! I had already tried deleting 20 comments at a time. Wow that would have taken forever. Thanks again!
I’ve been using WordPress for the last six months and had no problems running any feature or understanding it closely, but spam comments was really getting on my nerves. Initially I decided to ignore the piling comments, only to discover later that they amounted to a few thousands.
That is when I searched the internet to find out how I could remove all
the spam.
What really scared me was the time it would take to delete so many comments – I then installed the CAPTCHA and was relieved to see the spam folder empty in just one click.