Deleting Unapproved Comments

Spam Comments can be frustrating for any blogger. Many people set WordPress to require comment approval in order to make sure spam isn’t being posted to the site. If you have it set to require approval, and ff you’ve ever allowed those unapproved comments to build up, manually deleting them can take hours. Fortunately, there are plugins that can delete these for you and some even have options for optimizing the database after they have deleted the comments.

One plugin that can help is Clean Up Booster.

Using Clean Up Booster for Deleting Unapproved Comments

Install the plugin, Clean Up Booster.

Note it is always a good idea to run a backup before installing new plugins. In a case, like this, where you are going to delete items from the database, it is VERY IMPORTANT to run a backup before following these steps.

1. From the Dashboard, select Clean Up Booster.
2. Select Manually Delete Comments.
3. Scroll down and select Unapproved Comments. Note that there are many other things you can delete like Revisions, Trackbacks, and Deleted Posts.
4. Click the Empty button. You will receive a warning message to make sure you want to delete these. Approve it, and the comments will be deleted.

Note that you can use the WordPress Bulk feature to select several different types of data and delete them all at once.

Optimizing Your Database

What I left out of the video is that after cleaning the comments, you should  optimize the database. Cleaning large amounts of data out of the database leaves holes where those items existed. Optimizing pulls everything back together.

From the Clean Up Booster screen. Notice that under where you originally clicked on Clean Up WordPress Data, it says Database.

Click on Database > Manual Clean Up

Note that this is a case where you want to use the Bulk feature.

1. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and see how many table entries you have. I have 23.
2. Return to the top of the page and select to show more entries than you have. I selected 25. This allows you to only have 1 page so that you can truly select everything and not have to repeat the process on multiple pages.
3. Near the top, Select the checkbox next to Table Name. This selects all tables on the page.
4. At the top where it says Bulk Action, select Optimize.
5. Click the Apply button and let the software do its magic.