How to Show Parent Comment in WordPress Comments (Easy Way)

Ever noticed how confusing WordPress comment sections can get when readers start replying to each other? You’ll see a response that feels out of place, or someone asking a question that was already answered just a few comments up.

This isn’t just frustrating for your readers. It also makes it difficult for you to moderate conversations in the WordPress admin area. When you can’t easily see the original comment a reply is referring to, you lose all the important context.

The good news is, WordPress actually supports threaded comments to help organize discussions. However, the default comment system doesn’t let you see which comment someone is responding to in your moderation screen.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to display parent comments in WordPress step by step. We’ve tested this method across different themes and setups and it works fine. 🙌

The Problem With WordPress Comment Moderation

Enabling comments is a great way to boost engagement on your site. By allowing users to leave comments on your blog posts and enabling replies to those comments, you create a space for users to share their thoughts and ask questions.

WordPress makes it easy for users to reply to comments by clicking the Reply button below each one.

When someone replies, you will also see a link to the parent comment in the admin area.

It looks like this:

During comment moderation, you may want to see the parent comment to understand the context of a reply.

However, clicking that link opens the parent comment in a new browser tab. In our experience managing thousands of comments across our blogs, opening new tabs for every single reply severely slows down your workflow, especially if you get dozens of comments a day.

This is distracting and makes it much harder to follow the flow of the conversation.

With that in mind, we will show you how to easily view the parent comment directly in your moderation screen. Here’s a quick overview of all the things we’ll cover in this guide:

Let’s get started!

Install and Activate a WordPress Comment Plugin

The first thing you need to do is install and activate the Thrive Comments plugin.

It is part of the premium Thrive Suite, a collection of powerful tools designed to help you create conversion-focused sites. The plugin completely upgrades your front-end comments section with a new interface while providing a dedicated, easy-to-use moderation dashboard.

We extensively reviewed it, and we are confident that it’s the best plugin for improving WordPress comments. For more details on our testing experience, refer to our complete Thrive Themes Suite review.

To use the platform, you must first sign up for an account on the Thrive Themes website.

After that, you’ll be redirected to your Thrive Themes account dashboard.

Here, you can click on the link that says ‘Download and install the Thrive Product Manager plugin.’

Once you have the .zip file for the Thrive Product Manager on your computer, you need to upload it to WordPress.

To do this, go to Plugins » Add New Plugin in your WordPress dashboard and click the ‘Upload Plugin’ button at the top. If you need help, then you can read our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

After activating the plugin, navigate to the ‘Product Manager’ menu item in your WordPress dashboard.

Here, you’ll need to connect your Thrive Themes account with your WordPress site, so go ahead and hit the ‘Log into my account’ button.

Then, you can enter your Thrive Themes account credentials into the respective fields.

Once the connection is verified, it’s time to install Thrive Comments.

From the ‘Thrive Dashboard,’ let’s look for ‘Thrive Comments’ and click on its ‘Install Product’ checkbox.

Next, scroll to the bottom of the panel and click the ‘Install selected products (1)’ button.

When the installation is done, you will see a success message that says, ‘Ready to use.’

Go ahead and click the ‘Go to the Thrive Themes Dashboard’ button.

Enable Comment Moderation Using Thrive Comments

Comment moderation works out of the box in Thrive Comments.

To check your settings, navigate to Thrive Dashboard » Thrive Comments from your WordPress admin panel.

This will take you to the Thrive Comments settings area, where you can configure additional settings for your WordPress comments section.

From here, you can scroll down to ‘Comment Moderation’ and expand the menu item. Then, you should see that comment moderation has been activated on your WordPress site.

By default, Thrive Comments sets the site’s admin, authors, and editors as users who can moderate comments. Then, it also checks the rules in the ‘Before a comment appears’ section, like this:

You can easily tweak these settings to fit your site’s needs, such as requiring manual approval for every single comment. Any changes you make will be automatically saved.

Once you have finished customizing, every time a user leaves a comment, you’ll need to approve it before it shows on the blog post in question.

Here’s what it looks like from Comments » Thrive Comments Moderation:

View the Parent Comment During Moderation

With Thrive Comments, this feature works right out of the box, so you don’t need to configure any extra settings when someone replies to a comment.

From Comments » Thrive Comments Moderation, click on any pending reply in your queue, and then simply look at the right-hand panel. Keep in mind that you need to use this specific Thrive menu, as the default WordPress comments view will remain unchanged.

Here, you can find the parent comment a user is replying to, which allows you to quickly understand the context of a comment with no further adjustments.

You can then add your own reply or simply approve or delete a comment.

Bonus Tip: Gamify WordPress Comments Using Thrive Comments

Now that you’ve simplified the moderation process, you can explore other Thrive Comments features to make your comment section more engaging for visitors.

Using the Thrive Comments ranking system can motivate people to write helpful comments.

For example, you could feature the top comments at the top of the page or award badges to the best ones.

If you’re interested in this, then feel free to go through the step-by-step instructions in our guide on how to add a simple user ranking system for WordPress comments.

Then, you might want to extend the comment features for users by offering upvote and downvote buttons. This system lets users decide which comments are the most relevant and pushes spam to the bottom.

For more information, you might want to see our detailed step-by-step instructions on how to allow users to like or dislike comments in WordPress.

FAQs: Show Parent Comment in the WordPress Comments

Here are some of the most common questions our readers ask about showing parent comments in WordPress.

Can I show the parent comment without using a plugin?

By default, WordPress doesn’t show the parent comment in the moderation screen. You could add custom code to make it work, but that can get complicated and might break when your theme updates (if added directly to the parent theme’s files) or when WordPress updates.

For most site owners, using a comment plugin like Thrive Comments is the easiest and most reliable way to add this feature.

Is Thrive Comments a free plugin?

No. Thrive Comments is a premium plugin that comes as part of the Thrive Suite. The suite includes a set of tools designed to help you build and grow conversion-focused websites.

Will using Thrive Comments slow down my website?

Thrive Comments is a well-coded plugin that’s built with performance in mind. Because it’s optimized for speed, it shouldn’t have a negative impact on your website’s loading time.

What’s the main benefit of showing the parent comment?

The biggest benefit is context. When you can see the original comment that someone is replying to, it makes conversations easier to follow and helps you moderate discussions more accurately.

Further Reading: Improve WordPress Comments

That’s all! We hope this article helped you learn how to easily view parent comments during moderation in WordPress. Next, you may also want to see our guides on:

• How to Make Blog Post Comments Searchable in WordPress
• How to Highlight Author’s Comments in WordPress
• How to Add Custom Fields to the Comments Form in WordPress
• How to Notify Users When Their Comment Is Approved in WordPress
• The Best Plugins to Improve WordPress Comments

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