What are WordPress comments?

Comments are a method for adding feedback by visitors to your page or post.  If you have comments enabled on your website you will see a special form usually below your posts and pages. Its appearance depends on your WordPress theme design. Please take a look on example:

Where can you leave a comment on a WordPress site?

You can leave comments only on singular view: single post, single page, single Custom Post Type. You can't leave a comment on homepage or archive view.

WordPress comments roles

administrators - they have full control on comments

editors - they can edit, moderate and delete comments

authors - they can view comments ( also with Pending status ), but they can't approve, moderate and delete comments

contributors - they can view comments ( also with Pending status ), but they can't approve, moderate and delete comments

subscribers - they can only leave a comment on a frontend

Managing WordPress comments

If you want to manage comments please go to Comments area in the WordPress dashboard. There you have a list of comments with managing options. You can approve, disapprove, mark as spam or move comments to trash. Deleted comments can be restored within 30 days. After this period Wordpress will remove these comments automatically.

WordPress comments settings

If you want to configure comments settings please navigate to Settings -> Discussion. Two most important options are to enable / disable comments and option to approve comments by administrator or editor.

You can also enable/disable avatars. Wordpress uses gravatar.com to get avatars. If user's email is matching with email registered in gravatar.com then Wordpress will use an avatar from this service. There is also an option to show avatars with specified rating. By default maximum rating is G ( suitable for all audiences ). The last avatar option is to change default avatar.

WordPress comments settings on specific post or page

The frequent situation is when we want to allow users to comment but we have for example "About Us" page with our team description and we don't want comments here. Fortunately, we can jest open specific post/page and disable comments.

If you don't see this box please click on Screen Options button and check Discussion checkbox.