Do you want to get less spam comments or spam mails via your contact form? Then hopefully you will find the right anti-spam plugin for your website in this post.
Spam mails are probably familiar to every Internet user. But for bloggers or website owners, spam is usually an even bigger problem. Because here not only the mail address is spammed. The unwanted advertising expands here also to other areas such as:
- Comment Spam
- Form Spam
- Registration spam
- Newsletter subscriptions
However, there are now some really good ways to combat spam. Even though, unfortunately, you will probably never be able to prevent it completely.
Anti-Spam Plugins for WordPress
Since I’m of course affected by this problem myself, I’d like to introduce you to a few WordPress Anti-Spam plugins that have proven themselves both on my own websites and on client projects.
All of them work discreetly in the background, so that the normal visitor is not tormented with annoying clicking on traffic lights and hydrants.
WP Armour – Honeypot Anti Spam
With the free Anti-Spam plugin WP Armour I have had only the best experiences so far. On all websites since the activation neither spam comments nor spam mails have been received via Contact Form 7.
The setup is done in a few seconds and the effect is very powerful. By using a honeypot the spam bots are blocked and the real website visitors are not annoyed by a captacha or quiz tasks.
You usually don’t have to change anything in the settings – the plugin runs directly by itself after activation. In the statistics you can see how effective the spam-fighting is.
Here are the main features of WP Armour:
- Prevents comment spam
- Fights spam for WordPress registration
- Anti-Spam for BBPress
- Protects against form spam: Contact Form 7, WPForms, Formidable Forms, Fluent Forms
- Anti-Spam for Divi Forms, Elementor Forms, Toolset Forms
Besides the free version, there is also WP Armour Extended, which includes some more features:
- 2-Level Spam Check
- IP address blocking
- WooCommerce
- Easy Digital Downloads
- QuForms, Ninja Forms, Gravity Forms
- Mailchimp
- Spammer Logs
The Pro version of this Anti-Spam plugin is available as a lifetime license (one-time payment without subscription) and starts at $19.99 for one website.
Antispam Bee
Antispam Bee is one of the most popular WordPress anti-spam plugins and blocks spam comments and trackbacks without any captchas. Since no personal data is sent to third-party services in the process, it can be used in a GDPR-compliant manner.
Antispam Bee Features:
- Blocks spam comments and trackbacks
- IP blocking
- Local spam database
- Allow comments only in a specific language
Unfortunately, the plugin only fights comment spam and cannot be used to protect forms. For this you have to use an additional antispam plugin. Or you can use a contact form that already offers an integrated spam defense like Fluent Forms.
Clean Talk
CleanTalk also does without any captcha or number puzzles. Spam bots are blocked discreetly in the background by a script, and a comparison with an online database is also performed. According to the provider, this is all GDPR-compliant, as the cloud-based solution also offers European servers. An AV contract can also be concluded. You can find out more at: https://cleantalk.org/publicoffer#cleantalk_gdpr_compliance .
Here are the main features of CleanTalk and the protected areas:
- Comments
- Registration
- Contact forms (CF7, WPForms, Elementor, Ninja Forms,….)
- Bookings
- BBPress
- Orders
- Surveys
- Disable comments
- Encoder for email addresses
- IP blocking
- Stop Words
- Detailed statistics
Unfortunately, you can only use this anti-spam plugin for free during a trial period of 7 days. After that you have to pay a fee that starts at $12,- per year for 1 website.
I have only tested the tool on one website so far, but here the spam defense worked reliably.
Honeypot for Contact Form 7
Honeypot for Contact Form 7 is an anti-spam addon for the popular CF7 form plugin. Again, no annoying captcha is displayed, but an invisible honeypot field.
The plugin setup is quite simple, but you have to add the honeypot field manually to your contact form.
I used to work with this plugin a frequently, but now it doesn’t seem to perform quite as well on many websites.
Akismet Spam Protection
Automattic has been offering Akismet Spam Protection for many years. It mainly fights comment spam, but also offers the integration of various contact form plugins.
The basic version is free, but for commercial websites there is a fee that starts at around $10 per year. However, to combat spam comments, data is sent to the USA, which is questionable for European websites in terms of data protection. Akismet has set up an extra info page on this topic.
Here the main features:
- Fighting spam comments
- Integration with Jetpack, Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, Formidable Forms
Even though this plugin works quite well for comment spam, I personally wouldn’t use it because of the privacy issue.
Email Address Encoder
Email Address Encoder is not a WordPress anti-spam plugin in the classical sense. But the tool protects your email address from bots that scan websites for email addresses. It converts your plain text email address into decimal and hexadecimal units. It remains readable for the website visitor, but becomes unusable for the bots.
In the source code it will look like this:
Here are the main features:
- Protection of email addresses in pages, posts, comments and text widgets.
- Protection of phone numbers via shortcode
Tip about spam comments
If you don’t want to allow comments on your website at all, you can simply disable WordPress comments. You can find the settings in the menu under > Settings > Discussion.
But even if you allow comments, you should pay attention to the following settings:
- Users must enter name and email address to comment
- Before a comment appears, it must be approved manually or the author must already be known.
In addition, you can also set up a blacklist in the comment settings. As soon as one of the words entered there appears in the comment, it is moved to the queue or the trash.
Conclusion
The last few years I really tried a lot of WordPress anti-spam plugins. Most of them were not really bad, but could never completely prevent spam. But currently, thanks to WP Armour, I have no spam at all anymore. Not even the mails sent by Eric Jones are coming in anymore!