How to Require Manual Approval of Comments in WordPress

Comments can add a lot of value to a post that you make in WordPress. Whether your site visitors want to thank you for your post, want additional information about it, or even want to post a complaint or problem that they had, it comments can be helpful to future visitors.

Unfortunately comment sections can also become riddled with spam, which could end up causing harm to your site’s search engine rankings, or could discourage real visitors from leaving comments. One way to combat this issue is to require all of the comments on your site to be manually approved. Our guide below will show you how to enable this option on your WordPress site.

How to Enable Manual Comment Approval

The steps in this article were performed in WordPress 5.2.1, but will also work in most other recent versions of WordPress.

Step 1: Sign into the admin section of your site at (yourdomain.com)/wp-admin.

Step 2: Hover over Settings in the left column, then choose the Discussion option.

Step 3: Scroll down to the Before a comment appears section, then check the box to the left of Comment must be manually approved.

Step 4: Scroll to the bottom of this menu and click the Save Changes button.

Are you finding comments to be more trouble than they’re worth? Find out how to turn off commenting in WordPress so that no one is able to comment on any of your posts in the future.