5 Awesome Tips to Reduce Spam on Your WordPress Site

Spammers are evil. They will crowd your site if you don’t keep tabs on them and this can have a huge impact on your viewers. They will be discouraged from visiting your website. So, you need to do everything in your power to keep your website spam free. This article covers some neat tricks to help your reduce spam on your WordPress site.

Follow these awesome tips and you can keep the disease of spams at bay before it becomes an unstoppable epidemic on your website.

Tip Number 1: Activate Akismet

You don’t even need to download this beauty. It already comes preinstalled on your WordPress download. Simply activate this plugin and feed in the API key that they send your way and you are all set.

Akismet is a very useful and an inexpensive option that automatically filters spam and keeps them from appearing on your website.

akismet

Glitch:

It is known for filtering out genuine comments from your website. Once you start using Akismet, you should make it a habit to check out the comments that have been filtered out as spam on at least a weekly basis.

That way you can ensure that no genuine comments have been marked as spam on your website.

Tip Number 2: Cookies for Comments

cookies for comments

True to its name, this is exactly what this plugin does. It sets a cookie for every visitor that visits the website. Most of the spams that your site will encounter are automated scripts. The key is to separate the automated scripts from the real ones.

Cookies for comments does exactly that, it tracks the site visits and figures if the visitor is an automated script of a genuine visitor.

Tip Number 3: Captcha Verification

Captcha Verification is simple methods through which users who want to add comments have to identify characters shown to them in an image.  Captcha protects your site from spam bots but not manual spammers.

Another drawback that you might want to consider is that Captcha settings might turn away genuine comments from appearing on your site as users might get discouraged from commenting on your site.

So use these settings wisely. In fact, record the change in the frequency of comments and if this setting has led to users not commenting on your site, then you might consider other methods for reducing spam on your website.

WP-reCaptcha is a great Captcha plugin for comments.

wp recaptcha

Tip number 4: Disable HTML settings in comments

The main purpose of spammers is to leave links to their sites on other sites so as to increase their click through rate. But if you remove the setting for creating links in the comment section, then the links that appear in your comments section will not be active links and visitors will not be able to click on them. As a result, they will be led elsewhere.

This is a great way to chop the purpose of the spam, but this will not stop spams from appearing on your site. It is a great additional setting for some of those few spams that escape the filters that you have set for them.

You can use Peter’s Literal Comments plugin for enabling this setting.

peter's literal comments

Simply install and activate this plugin and it will take care of the rest.

Tip Number 5: Disabling comments entirely of specifically

If your blog does not need comments, then you can simply disable comments from it and you are good to go. You won’t have to do any other settings to ensure no spam after that. However, very few bloggers might actually consider going for this option as most blogs are created to conduct a discussion.

You can do this by clicking on the settings section on your WordPress dashboard and going to Discussions

Discussion Settings ‹ testing site — WordPress

.Or you could use the Disable Comments plugin that will help you in disabling comments on your site wherever they are not needed.

disabling comments

When you visit the settings sections of your Disable Comments plugin you will see a section with options as shown below:

disable comments settings

There are three main settings in this plugin

  1. Everywhere: With this setting you can disable comments everywhere on your sites. It will not be a good option for users who want to have discussions on their sites via their blogs.
  2. On certain post types: This is the useful part of this plugin. You can choose where you want comments to appear, whether on certain posts, pages or on media attachments for which WordPress usually creates other pages.
  3. Use Persistent Mode:

In the persistent mode the comments will remain disabled even after you uninstall the plugin. So, it is advised to use this setting carefully, because once it is activated there will be no going back.

If you use these settings cautiously you will remove spams from your website by 90%. However, there will be a few strays that might escape your grasp. Fr those strays, there is always the option of manual blocking.