This tutorial will show you how to enable reviews (comments) and ratings for all WooCommerce products. To bulk update the comment status for a selected group of products, please see the article How to Bulk Edit WooCommerce Products in WordPress.
If the reviews tab is missing on the single product page, this tutorial may also be beneficial to enable customer reviews for the products with the comment status turned off.
What are WooCommerce Product Reviews?
When you are thinking about buying a product online you probably read the reviews before making the purchase. Everyone does this now, and a comment from someone who has already made the purchase weighs heavily on the buying decision. If you have an E-commerce website that doesn’t allow product reviews and ratings, your sales may be affected and the products might not even sell at all!
Luckily, WooCommerce has a built-in review and star rating system for products. How the reviews and star ratings look on the single product page will depend on the theme being used, and a plugin like All In One Schema Rich Snippets or WP Review Pro can extend this functionality to improve better search results on Google.
Depending on how your website is configured to handle comments, you may have to manually edit each product to turn this powerful feature on. This might take quite a while if you have a large catalog of products and don’t want to use the bulk edit process.
How to Enable Reviews (Comments) for All WooCommerce Products
The following steps will show you how to globally turn on reviews (comments) at once for every product using a single SQL query in phpMyAdmin.
Step 1. Configure Discussion Settings in WordPress
WooCommerce product reviews are handled the same way as comments in WordPress. This is because products are a custom post type and can receive comments if enabled. When a review is added to a product, it may be held for moderation or immediately become live depending on the WordPress comment settings.
Comment settings can be configured in the WordPress admin by visiting the Discussion Settings page:
Settings > Discussion
It is important to mention that the “Allow people to post comments on new articles” field should be checked if you want comments enabled by default for new posts and products.
Step 2. Enable Reviews (Comments) in WooCommerce Settings
The next step is to enable product reviews in WooCommerce. This will add a reviews tab on the single product page for the customer reviews and product ratings.
WooCommece > Settings > Products (tab)
The following options are available:
Enable reviews:
- Enable product reviews
- Show “verified owner” label on customer reviews
- Reviews can only be left by “verified owners”
Product ratings:
- Enable star ratings on reviews
- Star ratings should be required, not optional
Step 3. Use phpMyAdmin to Enable Reviews (Comments) for All Products
This step will require access to phpMyAdmin. The hosting account cPanel will usually allow access. Once you have logged in:
- Select the WordPress database from the sidebar on the left.
- Click the SQL tab.
- Copy and paste the following code into the RUN SQL query/queries box.
- If you used a database prefix other than “wp_” then you will need to change wp_posts to match the database table name on the left sidebar.
- Click Go on the bottom right of the box to run the query.
UPDATE wp_posts SET comment_status = 'open' WHERE post_type = 'product';
Final Thoughts
If you are unfamiliar or uncomfortable using phpMyAdmin, another solution is to use the One Click Close Comments plugin. It uses an AJAX-powered color code indicator (red means closed and green means open) on the post/product admin screens to update the comment status. You will still have to click each product one at a time, but the plugin is handy to visually determine which products have comments closed or open.
If you want to close reviews (comments) for all products:
UPDATE wp_posts SET comment_status = 'closed' WHERE post_type = 'product';
If you want to require a user to be logged in to review products:
UPDATE wp_posts SET comment_status = 'registered_only' WHERE post_type = 'product';
Don’t forget to backup your database first before making any changes to it!
Looking for more WooCommerce tutorials? Take a look at our article How to Open the WooCommerce Terms and Conditions Link in a New Tab.
Need help? Our WooCommerce Development Service is a complete solution for new or existing WooCommerce websites. Call us at 602-633-4758 for a free consultation.
Awesome, The SQL query is the best solution for old posts or products. Thanks for sharing such great info 🙂
Good Stuff and really helpful. It made this process really quick
This is a great article! Definitely a great way to add reviews to WooCommerce products.
I recently found TrustFeed reviews for WooCommerce, it helped me to replace the basic and boring WooCommerce reviews forms with an advanced and dynamic rating and reviews solution that actually inspire shoppers to buy more!
The plugin is free and can be dowloaded via official WordPress plugin repository:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/trustfeed-reviews-and-customer-feedback-for-woocommerce/
It comes with special features to help honest online businesses to collect and showcase customer reviews to boost sales, conversions, trust and social proof.
Some special features are:
* Create custom satisfaction surveys
* Star Ratings
* Dynamic Tags
* Text Reviews
* More coming…
* Send Mail After Purchase emails to encourage shoppers to leave reviews.
* Collect reviews at scale.
* Showcase reviews on key conversion points of your website.
* Display your reviews in an useful, responsive and customizable format.
* Moderate and manage feedback/reviews.
* Create a mini-site to increase your SEO with User Generated Content
* Customize widget’s look and feel.
* Learn from data driven insights
Thee good news. You can start for free!
* To learn more about TrustFeed you can visit www.trustfeed.co
* To view the admin panel, just login at https://admin.trustfeed.co and create a free account.
Well I was hoping I wouldn’t have to go to each product and enable reviews. 500 products. With this, it took me 10ms to get everything enabled!
Thanks you!!
Hi Paul, I’m glad this solution worked out for you.
Pretty article! I found some useful information in your blog, it was awesome to read, thanks for sharing this great content to my vision.
For those who open an e-commerce recently, using an internal plugin for reviews could be useful.
But surely the best strategy is to collect only verified reviews through external certifiers.
great
thanks a lot
Hi and thank you for the phpMyAdmin SQL code. Not easy to find this kind of info 🙂 I used it in woomultistore.com and it works like a charm.
Thanks. That did it. I couldn’t copy and paste for some reason, just had to be meticulous.
I have hired a developer to add a “Comment section” beside the review section on the “single product page” that will look like – Single product image, product Description, Comments, Review section. But the developer team confirmed that it is not possible in WooCommerce to add both “Comment + Review” sections on a single product page. Is it really true? Thanks & waiting for your valuable response…
Hello Rana, the WooCoomerce reviews are an extension of the WordPress comments. You are already using the WordPress comment mechanism when a visitor leaves a review for a product. But, there are WordPress plugins that will allow you to further extend WooCommerce reviews. My suggestion is to determine what features you are looking to implement and then have your developers look for a plugin that meets your needs, or develop what you need from the ground up.
nice post.
You really saved me hours and hours of work. I run an affiliate webshop with 20k products that did not have reviews enabled.
I just used a database plugin and went with your query and voila!
Thanks a bunch!
Really descriptive and informative. Thanx for sharing!
you really saved my hours
thanks for sharing