How can you best prevent spam comments or spam email submissions on your WordPress website? Well, we’re here to tell you how. You might be thinking, how about Akismet? After all, its free version is installed by default on all new WordPress sites. So is that the best choice to help you prevent spam on your WordPress site? It definitely could be if you’re just operating a small blog and don’t want any outgoing for a premium anti-spam plugin. However, bear-in-mind, the protection won’t be the best and you will still get spam coming through.
I’m run a business website, how can I prevent spam?
If you are running a website for your business or you run a large blog with a decent amount of monthly views, you are almost guaranteed to get heaps of spam comments on your website or hundreds of spam emails submitted through your contact form. If this is the case, then you’ll probably be wanting to know what to do help stop it. First, lets look at Akismet, it is good, after-all it has millions of users (however that figure is distorted as it is installed on every site by default even if deactivated), but it can get expensive quick due to its monthly payment. They also charge based on API requests, so the more visitors you have, the higher chance you have of needing the next plan.
What about Google reCAPTCHA? Whilst alongside other methods, this can be useful in preventing spam, it isn’t a silver bullet. Spam bots are becoming much more advanced and can easily bypass their checks these days so it won’t stop much. It will also slow your site down due to the extra scripts that the browsers have to download to run it. You shouldn’t rule this out. It can beneficial to have this alongside another method for the best protection. However, I prefer the increased speed so I choose to not have it at all anymore.
So what is the best way to stop the endless spam?
The answer to this question is CleanTalk Anti-Spam. It literally was the answer to my dreams, when I was asking this same question. I was receiving hundreds of spam emails through the contact form every day. I was getting endless spam comments too. So I installed this plugin, and the amount of spam I received went down to 0. It was like a miracle. And the best thing of all is the price. It only costs just $8 a year at the time of writing to protect 1 website. That’s an absolute bargain. I opted for their package to protect 10 websites which cost just $46 a year. So not only does it provide great value for money, especially for a single website when compared to Akismet, it also performs better too.
This article just covers how to protect your website from Spam, but for other security tips check out my article about how to secure your website for more tips.
Disclaimer:
The link above is an affiliate link, so if you use the link and decided to purchase the product I may receive a small amount of commission which helps me keep this site running. You may wonder if this makes my recommendation biased. It doesn’t because I could just have easily created an affiliate account for Akismet and posted that too. But that isn’t how I work and I will only ever promote products I truly believe in and would still recommend it even if you decide not to use the link above.
