Guide

Reader comments

2 min read 356 words Updated 14 August 2026

Comments are the one part of a site its owner did not write: names, dates, threads and opinions readers left over years. They ship by default, addressed by page URL rather than by a post ID that means nothing on the other side of a migration.

Comments are the one part of a site its owner did not write: names, dates, threads and opinions readers left over years. They ship by default, from /wp/v2/comments, which a public WordPress serves without authentication — and serves approved comments only, which is exactly what a migration wants (pending and spam rows are moderation state, not content).

They leave the export as one comments.json beside metadata.json:

 1{
 2  "total": 128,
 3  "pages": 31,
 4  "exported_at": "2026-08-14T18:20:11Z",
 5  "comments": [
 6    {
 7      "id": 4711,
 8      "post": 812,
 9      "parent": 0,
10      "post_url": "/blog/wms-implementation-pitfalls/",
11      "author": "Jan Kowalski",
12      "author_url": "https://example.org",
13      "author_avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/…?s=96",
14      "date": "2024-03-01T10:00:00Z",
15      "date_gmt": "2024-03-01T09:00:00Z",
16      "content": "<p>Świetny tekst — u nas WMS wszedł dokładnie tak.</p>",
17      "status": "approved",
18      "type": "comment",
19      "link": "/blog/wms-implementation-pitfalls/#comment-4711"
20    }
21  ]
22}

Two things make the file portable:

post_url, not just post. A WordPress post ID means nothing on the other side of a migration; the page address does. It takes the same form as the post's own link, so --link-style root yields /blog/…/ and the default yields the absolute URL. A comment whose post was not exported (excluded by --no-posts, a path filter, or left in draft) falls back to its own permalink with the #comment-N anchor trimmed off.
Creation order. Comments are sorted by id, so a reply never precedes the comment it answers when a target system replays them into a table with a parent reference.

A site with the REST route switched off or gated prints a note and carries on — --no-comments skips the attempt entirely. The two cases read differently, because their remedies do: a site that turned commenting off answers 403 rest_comment_disabled and is reported as having no comments, while a gated route is the one worth --auth-user/--auth-token. An export with no comments writes no file: an empty comments.json would claim the site has none, when the truth may be that they were never requested.