If WordPress is your content management platform of choice, chances are mighty good you have had to deal with spam on your site. From unwanted comments on your blog to bots attacking your registration forms, fighting spam is a duty all WordPress users face. Luckily for today’s webmasters, there are a growing number of powerful spam-fighting plugins available. You can now install a plugin on your site to protect your outgoing email from data-capturing spammers, stop spam bots from entering data on your ecommerce forms, and banish trackback-seeking spammers from your comments section.
If you are tired of spending precious hours deleting useless spam content from your site, check out the following roundup of 10 top-rated anti-spam WordPress plugins.
Alobaidi Captcha
If you want to stop spam on your WordPress forms and blog posts, consider adding the Alobaida Captcha plugin to your site. This helpful plugin works on login forms, registration forms, and blog post comment sections too. You can disable the captcha request if a user is logged into your site and can even translate this captcha into your language of choice. With over 800 installs and a five-star rating, the Alobaidi Captcha plugin is definitely worth investigating. It’s easy to install and has the option to allow logged-in users to avoid having to use captcha, so returning, register users will stay happy.
Spam Protection by CleanTalk
Offered by CleanTalk, the Spam Protection plugin stops spam without the use of captchas. Protect your site from spam bots and backlink-seeking spammers on everything from your purchase orders and newsletters registrations to your emails. This plugin works with numerous existing comment interfaces including JetPak and WordPress’ own commenting system, which means you won’t have conflicts. You can stop spam comments as well as unwanted registrations, spam contact emails, spammy orders and more. Spam Protection also checks existing comments for spam when you install. Quarantine spammers to manually delete entries or automatically delete suspected spambot submissions. This plugin has 40,000+ installs and a five-star rating.
SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam
The SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam WordPress plugin helps reduce spam by making site visitors enter a code that is placed atop an image. This captcha + image combination stops bots from entering data on your comment or registration forms and drastically reduces the amount of spam on your site. You can disable this plugin for logged in site visitors. With over a quarter of a million active installations, this is a very popular plugin. It’s actively updated and the support boards also seem active, so you should be secure knowing it will continue to be updated.
WP-Spamshield Anti-Spam
If you don’t want site visitors to know you have spam protection installed on your site, the WP-Spamshield Anti-Spam plugin is must-discover WordPress tool. This powerful plugin helps stop multiple forms of spam including trackback spam and ecommerce registration spam. This helpful plugin works with WooCommerce, BuddyPress, MailChimp, Ninja Forms and numerous other third party WordPress interfaces. Visitors never have to enter a captcha on your site, yet your website will remain protected and free of annoying spam.
Spam Destroyer
With a 4.5 star rating, the Spam Destroyer plugin is worth checking out. While some users report false positives, the majority of users find this plugin stops almost all spam. Updated on a regular basis, this plugin has over 6000 happy users. A lot of people say Spam Destroyer actually works better than Akismet and since this plugin is compatible with so many other WordPress plugins, it should remain a trouble free solution for spam problems.
Email Encoder Bundle - Protect Email Address
If you want to safeguard your email recipient addresses from spam bots, add the Email Encoder Bundle - Protect Email Address plugin to your site. This handy plugin automatically encodes all outgoing email addresses spam bots can’t access them. With this plugin installed, you can also use shortcodes to protect plain text data within your emails. This plugin doesn’t just protect Email and phone numbers though, it also works on RSS feeds and supports special characters like é, â, ö and even Chinese characters, so it’s a multi-language spam killer.
WangGuard
The WangGuard plugin offers a SSL-enabled API to comply with European information distribution laws. This plugin can protect your site from content-stealing sploggers (spam bloggers who scrape other sites) and can stop unwanted spam registrations on your site’s forms. Whether you are using BuddyPress, bbPress 2.0, or WordPress, you can depend on the WangGuard plugin to keep your site protected. There are some great addons for this plugin too, like a comprehensive list of ‘blacklisted’ words and more. Free for personal use, but they do ask for payment if you earn more than $200 per month with your website.
Anti-Splog
For even more protection against sploggers, check out the Anti-Splog plugin. This plugin offers multiple layers of protection against unwanted sploggers attacking your site. Identify and blacklist nasty spam aficionados to reduce the amount of time you have to spend removing unwanted content and backlink attempts from your WordPress site.
Stop Spammers Spam Prevention
If you want to keep your WordPress site protected against malicious hacker attacks while eliminating spam, check out the Stop Spammers Spam Prevention plugin. With multiple customization options, you can stop spam from 100+ countries. This plugin automatically completes numerous spam-detection checks and lets you instantly banish spammers who cannot complete captcha verification checks.
Akismet
Perhaps the most well-known of all anti-spam WordPress plugins, the Akismet plugin has over one million downloads. Use this plugin to not only catch suspected spam on your site but to find backlink URLs hidden within comments too. Review the history of each spam attempt on your site and block repeat offenders.
Hide My WP
A lot of times, WordPress spammers will target your site by the footprint it leaves behind, which is why it’s a great idea to leave no trace that you’re even using WordPress. If you want to completely obscure your WordPress installation to keep spammers from even finding your site in the first place, Hide My WP is a nice solution. This is a premium plugin, so it’ll cost you around $23 right now, but it’ well worth it. Sometimes you can get hacked or crushed with spam when a plugin isn’t completely up to date when a new vulnerability shows up. That recently happened with Gravity Forms and even JetPack, so making your site invisible to spammers and hackers is a great line of defense, just in case.
Protecting your site from spam is one of the unfortunate parts of being a webmaster. Whether you own an up-and-coming ecommerce site or blog occasionally on a lifestyle blog, spammers will attempt to attack your site regardless of your site’s popularity. The above-listed spam protection plugins can greatly reduce the amount of time you have to spend of spam-fighting. Will you be downloading any of these WordPress spam protection plugins?
