Are you looking for an easy way to bulk delete spam comments in WordPress?
Comment spam is a huge problem, and deleting unwanted messages a few at a time can be very time-consuming.
In this article, we’ll show you how to quickly batch delete spam comments on your WordPress website.
Why You Need to Deal with Comment Spam in WordPress
Comment spam is a problem faced by many WordPress websites. Akismet, the popular spam filtering service for WordPress, blocks about 7.5 million spam comments every hour.
You can combat spam using our list of 12 vital tips and tools to combat comment spam in WordPress. But while you can minimize the number of spam comments you receive, you will never avoid them completely.
You could use the WordPress bulk actions feature to delete multiple spam comments at once. But unfortunately, this only works with comments on the current page, not all of the spam comments on your website.
If your spam folder has hundreds or thousands of comments, then deleting spam this way will be time-consuming. Luckily, there is a plugin that can help.
But take care. Bulk deleting many comments at one time is risky because there is always a chance you may accidentally click the wrong checkbox. We recommend that you backup your WordPress website first.
With that being said, let’s look at how to quickly batch delete spam comments in WordPress.
Batch Deleting Spam Comments in WordPress
The first thing you need to do is install and activate the WP Bulk Delete plugin. Learn more from our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, you should visit the WP Bulk Delete » Delete Comments page of your WordPress dashboard. Here you can delete comments by status, author, post, date and time.
Next to the Comment Status label, you should click the Spam Comments checkbox. This option will let you batch delete every spam comment on your WordPress website.
Then you need to scroll to the bottom of the page and click the Delete Comments button. Congratulations, you have completely deleted all spam comments from your website.
We hope this tutorial helped you learn how to quickly batch delete spam comments in WordPress.
You may also want to learn how to move your WordPress site from HTTP to HTTPS, or check out list of must have plugins to grow your site.
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Tim Pettiford says
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?
Lindsay Dick says
Hey, did you ever find a solution to this. I’m having the same problem
Jennifer Lalo says
This plug-in just saved me from manually deleting 2,000+ comments. Thank you very much — worked like a charm.
Debbie Takara Shelor says
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!
Chris Hazel says
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.