How to Protect Your WordPress Site From Spam?
How to Protect Your WordPress Site From Spam?
The website owners understand that having comment and message sections on the site makes it easier to interact with the users. Unfortunately, these are also the sections where spammers socialize.
For example, your company’s website performs well in the SERPs for specific keywords. There’s a risk that competitors invested less time and effort in SEO for the same keywords. As a result, they will attempt to exploit rankings by flooding the message area using backlinks.
The spam bots are becoming sophisticated with each passing day. This means keeping the website blog section free of inappropriate content becomes challenging.
On the other hand, spamming contact forms come as an automated activity carried out by bots. Additionally, their primary goal is to identify website vulnerabilities that can provide access to digital assets and gather vital information.
All in all, you are gonna experience new spam every time you visit your website.
Luckily, WordPress platforms have amazing add-ons and in-built features that assist in combating and handling comment spam. In addition, several third-party plugins are available in the market that offers spam security.
Are you facing any such hassles?
Don’t worry!! In this write-up, we will cover all the measures to avoid unwanted messages or comments. Let’s get started!!
Ways to Protect Your WordPress Site Against Spam
Activate the Captcha Checkbox
Ticking the Re-Captcha option on the contact form plugin is an excellent approach to avoid spam on your website. Follow the steps below to enable this on your website’s WP-Forms:
- Go to the form’s settings and open the Recaptcha tab.
- Now, choose the Recaptcha checkbox. You may also need to fill in the secret or site key.
- To achieve these keys, firstly you need to do a website registration following the appropriate steps.
- Once done, the screen will display the keys. Now, copy and paste these onto the settings pages of WPForms.
- Save the settings by clicking on the option available on the footer of the WPForms builder form.
- Now, click on the Recaptcha field that will pop up a notification enabling the Recaptcha.
All of this implies that anyone wishing to contact you via the form must first demonstrate that they are human. How? Before submitting anything, tick the checkbox.
Of course, spamming bots can not do this. Thus, eliminating the maximum chances of spam reaching your inbox.
Comment Moderation
This is the best solution if you want to completely protect the website when it comes to spamming. Comment moderation allows you to read and consent to comments before they are approved and made public.
In addition, it becomes quite challenging as the spamming will continue. However, the visitors will only be able to view the top-quality comments as you can delete most of the spam comments.
Furthermore, you can pause the comments for review depending on the numbers, URLs, links, or names. In this way, some of the comments will be allowed automatically while others will require your permission.
Utilize Anti-Spam WordPress Plugins
Several WordPress developers understand that the WordPress platform relies on plugins a lot. This is because it helps to deliver additional functionalities to the websites. It also includes spam protection.
Some of the best plugins with the primary function of protecting the sites from spam are WangGuard, Anti-Spam Bee, Akismet, and more. All are well-known for protection against spam but differ in most of the functionalities.
Additionally, such anti-spam plugins work much better in keeping the spam at bay than the inappropriate message submissions.
Blacklist IP Addresses
Another vital option is to block traffic from specific regions or IP addresses. It prohibits the establishment of spam contacts.
So, before implementing this strategy, ensure checking all spam submissions to identify the most prevalent and widely utilized IPs for spam requests.
After you’ve identified and listed all of the locations and IP addresses, it’s time to ban them. How? Use WordPress settings, the cPanel on your website, plugins, or web hosting.
However, keep in mind that you may lose prospective traffic from the locations you’ve chosen to restrict. If you’re getting a lot of legitimate traffic from a particular location, keep it active to avoid missing out on any leads.
Use Invisible Captcha
The biggest issue with the Recaptcha option is that it may humiliate certain website users to prove they are not bots. As a result, if your website receives a lot of traffic, turn off the Recaptcha option.
How will it work?
It will only work at the time of submission. Firstly, there will be no checkbox for the visitor to click. The information entered in the fields will be evaluated by the Google algorithm. This will reveal whether or not the submission was made by a bot. Overall, the Recaptcha verification will represent the visitor.
To do so, select the “Invisible Recaptcha Badge” option while website registration. “I’m not a robot” is no longer an option. Repeat the steps once more. To get to the builder form, go to the dashboard. Finally, press the Invisible Recaptcha option.
Consider Honeypot Protection
Several WordPress-based websites depend on multiple plugins to function effectively. One feature it involves is the contact form feature. However, such form plugins are limited with the spam protection functionality.
As a result, think and act wisely when selecting a contact form plugin for your website. Before you choose a plugin, read the reviews for each one. It is recommended that you use a plugin that includes honeypot protection.
Honeypot protection is a built-in security feature that adds an unnoticed input field to your contact form. Whenever the bot will try to send a spam message to the site, the honeypot field will appear as the part of the form that the bot will fill unknowingly. At the time of submission, the field with data will be detected and rejected as spam.
Summing Up
To conclude, all these are the proven tips that lower the spam message count on the website regularly. Besides, you can hire WordPress development services to seek professional assistance on how to protect websites from comment spam. Of course, safeguarding the site against irrelevant messages is vital as it influences the overall website’s performance.
But also remember that eliminating spam isn’t possible. However, you can surely count on all these ways to maintain a spam-free database and deliver an exceptional visitor experience.
