WooCommerce is a free ecommerce plugin for WordPress which allows to create both physical and digital products store. Though it is a heavy plugin using large amount of server resources, it is super easy to setup and process customer orders. Getting reviews from users is one of the in-built functions in WooCommerce. If you want to use any other plugins for customer reviews then you should disable the feature in WooCommerce so that they are not conflicting.
Why to Disable Default WooCommerce Product Review?
Here are some of the reasons you should disable default product reviews in WooCommerce.
- Default setup is simple only with star ratings and there are no pros/cons or option to review individual product features. Even you can’t customize the appearance of the star ratings.
- Reviews are hidden behind a tab and users need to click the “Reviews” tab on product pages to leave a response or view existing reviews.
- No option to prevent spam reviews.
- You may want to integrate another plugin for site wide reviews. For example, you want to include reviews for blog posts and WooCommerce product pages using a plugin. This is not possible with the WooCommerce setup as it only supports product pages.
Below is an example of how reviews from the default setup and a third-party plugin looks:
Disable Product Reviews in WooCommerce
Default WooCommerce review section has two parts – review message box and star rating. You can disable both following the below instructions:
- Login to your WordPress admin panel and navigate to “WooCommerce > Settings” section.
- Go to “Products” tab and scroll down to bottom of the page to find “Reviews” section.
- Uncheck “Enable product reviews” option showing against “Enable reviews” heading.
- Click “Save changes” button to apply your changes.
Only Disable Star Ratings
You can also only disable the start rating and keep the review message box.
- Under the “Reviews” heading, check “Enable product review” option. You can select whether the reviews can be left by anyone or only the verified owners.
- Uncheck “Enable star rating on reviews” option against “Product ratings” heading. You can also make the ratings optional instead of disabling it completely.
- Click “Save changes” button to reflect your settings on live product pages.
Delete Existing Product Reviews in WooCommerce
If your products already have existing reviews, disabling in settings will only remove “Reviews” tab from the product pages. However, you can still find the star ratings on product lists on shop and category archive pages. Since the reviews are still available in database, your theme can still fetch and display on different places as per the design.
To remove all references to star ratings, you need to delete all existing completely form the products. Earlier, WooCommerce used to mix the reviews with default WordPress comments. However, now they are available separately making it easier to delete them.
- Go to “Products > Reviews” section in your admin panel.
- Here you will find all existing product reviews left by your customers.
- Select all reviews by checking the box in the header row (just below the bulk actions dropdown).
- Click the “Bulk actions” dropdown and select “Move to Trash”.
- Click “Apply” button to delete all the reviews on that page. If multiple pages are shown, then repeat the action till you delete all reviews.
- After that, go to “Trash” and click “Empty Trash” button.
Note that instead of deleting, you can simply “Unapprove” the reviews and keep them if you need it later. Unfortunately, you can’t download the reviews from frontend if you want to upload to any third-party plugin setup.
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