No WooCommerce Product Reviews Tab?

No WooCommerce product reviews tab? Maybe this is why.

I decided to activate product reviews on a site running WooCommerce.

I recalled that I had disabled reviews soon after I set up the site. That was on the advice of someone writing about how to reduce load on the server with requests going back and forth. That was on a site getting thousands of hits an hour. Still, I followed the advice.

Now I wanted to bring back product reviews. They would show up in the Reviews tab next to the Description tab on single product pages.

I saw a comment by Mike Jolley of the WooCommerce team, that reviews are a type of comment. Therefore, comments have to be enabled on the site.

I had the Disable Comments plugin activated, so the first thing was to deactivate it. In fact, I no longer need it since Gutenberg. With Gutenberg you can mark any individual post or page ‘Allow Comments’ or not, by checking a box in the post or page sidebar.

Next thing, make sure that comments were set to be moderated before being published.

Now to WooCommerce itself. Go to Settings/Products and Enable product reviews. Check off to show the verified owner label on customer reviews; check off that reviews can only be left by verified owners; and enable star ratings on reviews.

Done.

I still couldn’t see the Reviews tab next to the Description tab in the individual Product pages.

Why was the Review tab not showing on the Product pages?

What was the problem?

I googled. Perhaps there was something left hanging over in the database for the disable comments plugin? Hardly, but you never know.

Perhaps I had added something to a php file to disable comments? Perhaps, perhaps. I FTP’d in and looked in the files. Nothing. 

I watched youtube videos explaining how to enable reviews.

Nothing. No answer. What I did see was that it was a problem that had been asked about time and time again.

And then I spotted something – a graphic showing the product bulk editing screen. Oh yes, I need to ‘enable reviews’ if they are not enabled.

This is a screen grab of the back end of my WooCommerce site. I’ve put a red line around the ‘enable reviews’ box: 

a screen grab of the back end of my WooCommerce site with a red line around the 'enable reviews' box

Were they enabled on my site? No, they were not.

I had disabled them ages ago.

That was the answer. 

I highlighted all the products, checked that box, and bingo. Now the Reviews tab was there, next to the Description tab.

Tip: Rather than have to enable each page of products one by one, temporarily change the number of products shown per page to a number greater than all the products you have on the site.

To edit the number of products per page, click on the screen options tab dropdown at the top of the page.

Then you can click to bulk edit all of them in one go.