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Why Aren’t WordPress Comments Appearing? Enable comments in WordPress

Category: WordPress
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There are only about a million possible solutions to the problem of WordPress comments not appearing. However, there are only a handful of very common solutions to this problem.

You’ve Used Pages Instead of Posts

By default, WordPress doesn’t show comment forms on pages, only on posts. You can check this by logging into your WordPress admin area, clicking on Pages, and on Posts, and seeing how many of each you have. Then, as a user who is not logged in, try visiting a post, submitting a comment, then logging in as admin, approving the comment and check to see if the comment is appearing.

If you don’t have any posts, but instead have pages, you have two options:

  1. Change your pages to become posts, or
  2. Change your pages so they accept comments

Change Pages to Posts

A bit of copy, add post and paste, will get your pages moved over to being posts.

OR

Change Pages to Accept Comments

Although WordPress doesn’t normally accept comments on pages, it can be done.

Within the WP-Admin area, go to pages, then click on one of the pages where you’d like to enable comments.

In the top right, click Screen Options, then tick the Discussion tickbox. Once updated, you’ll see a discussion box at the bottom of the page.

Now, just tick the box next to Allow Comments, and click Update.

You’ll now be able to accept comments on your existing page.

This can be done in bulk with the quick editor, once you’ve enabled the discussion tickbox in Screen Options.

Why You Can’t Enable Comments in WordPress?

When you’re troubleshooting why comments aren’t appearing on posts and you’re convinced it’s not a simple setting in your theme options….

Start by making sure you’ve got comments enabled in WordPress admin settings:

  Settings -> Discussion -> Default Post Settings

Once there, make sure you’ve got the boxes ticked for allowing people to submit comments on posts.

You’ve done all these things, but you still can’t see a comment form on post pages? It could be that you’ve made the changes, but that caching is preventing you from getting the newest versions of pages.

Browser Cache

Be sure to go into your browser, close any tabs with the site open, and clear cookies and cache, then open the post pages again and check to see if the comment form is present.

WordPress Cache Plugins

There are a lot of possible plugins you might have installed, so go through the list and within any performance optimizers, be sure to clear cache. Common plugins include:

  • W3 Total Cache
  • WP Super Cache
  • WP Fastest Cache
  • WP Rocket
  • WP-Optimize
  • SG Optimizer
  • Cache Enabler
  • Comet Cache
  • Hyper Cache
  • And many more

Be sure to follow the browser cache clearing steps afterward, so that there’s no question about why something does or doesn’t work.

Content Delivery Networks (CDN’s)

Content delivery networks are designed to offload your content onto their networks, so even when your server is offline, your website continues to be visible to the world. Some CDN’s are managed via WordPress admin settings / plugin settings, and others are visible within cPanel or other web hosting control panel configuration and management options. Popular CDN’s include:

  • CloudFlare
  • Sucuri
  • MaxCDN
  • KeyCDN
  • Incapsula
  • Jetpack Photon
  • Swarmify
  • Azure
  • AWS
  • Google

Hosting Cache Software

There are some tremendous differences between hosting companies, server software and the caching approaches undertaken in each scenario. Most all of these are administered from within the control panel provided by your web hosting provider. Some common hosting control panels include:

  1. cPanel
  2. Plesk
  3. Direct Admin
  4. Webmin
  5. hPanel

There are a handful of common caching technologies in use across these panels include:

  • LiteSpeed LSCache
  • Redis
  • Memcached
  • Varnish

Clear cache from within whichever one you’ve got, then clear browser cache and check for the presence of comment forms.

In some extremely unlucky cases, you may have to clear hosting cache, WordPress plugin cache, CDN and browser cache in order to see the comment forms.

If that still doesn’t work, you may have overlooked something such as comments aren’t actually enabled on posts, you’re using pages instead of posts or your theme has some options controlling this that you’ve overlooked.

Why You Can’t Disable Comments in WordPress?

When you’re troubleshooting why comments are appearing on posts, even though you’ve disabled them and you’re convinced it’s not a simple setting in your theme options….

Start by making sure you’ve got comments disabled in your WordPress admin settings:

  Settings -> Discussion -> Default Post Settings

Once there, make sure you’ve got the boxes unticked for allowing people to submit comments on posts.

You’ve done all these things, but you still see a comment form on post pages? It could be that you’ve made the changes, but that caching is preventing you from getting the newest versions of pages.

Refer to our guidance on Why You Can’t Enable Comments in WordPress – checking the sections on caching:

  1. Browser
  2. WordPress plugins
  3. CDN’s
  4. Hosting

Conclusion

Have a WordPress website? Check out our Managed WordPress Hosting and see if we are a good fit for you. KnownHost offers 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, all 7 days of the week best in class technical support. A dedicated team ready to help you should you need our assistance. You’re not using KnownHost for the best webhosting experience? Well, why not?

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