WordPress anti-spam plugins are plentiful, but finding the right one to protect your WordPress site from spam comments can be an intimidating task. In this article, we will show you the best anti-spam plugins that may be used to help protect your WordPress site from an onslaught of spam.
If you’re looking for a plugin that handles spam, adds functionality to the editor, and much more, check out Jetpack!
Akismet
The Akismet plugin is certainly the most popular spam prevention plugin for WordPress. Due to it’s wide use and connection to a centralized server that keeps track of spam for you, the large majority of spam is blocked automatically.
Due to the plugin being developed by Automattic, the team behind WordPress, it will always be sure to work with the latest version of WordPress and is constantly developed to ensure that minimal issues arise.
As the plugin connects directly to remote servers for its spam detection technology, the one downside is that if your server for some reason cannot connect to their servers, you will not be protected from spam. This can also result in additional server load as it will need to check for each comment.
Configuration is also quite limited. This can be great for users who want a simple method with minimal configuration, but power users won’t have nearly as much control over what they block and allow compared to other anti-spam plugins.
Akismet is free for personal use, although for commercial use, a business license should be purchased for a small fee of $5-$50 per month.
Anti-spam by CleanTalk
Anti-Spam by CleanTalk is quite effective in not only blocking comment spam, but also signup spam in WordPress, BuddyPress, and bbPress as well as several form plugins such as Contact Form 7 and the JetPack contact form.
Just like Akismet, it uses a remote database to check for potential spam, which is effective in keeping a wide database of potential spam threats across all sites that use the plugin, but it can also be affected by connection issues between your site and CleanTalk’s servers.
This anti-spam plugin is free to download, but will require an access key which can be acquired directly from CleanTalk’s servers. There is a free 30-day trial available, but users will need to pay for the service at the end of that period. Although it is paid, the services is as cheap as $8 for a single site with unlimited protection so it is certainly affordable if you decide to continue using it.
WangGuard
WangGuard is a free anti-spam plugin that blocks spam registrations on your WordPress site. Whether you are protecting normal WordPress, Multisite, BuddyPress, or bbPress registrations, WangGuard can protect your site from any spam users from registering new accounts. WangGuard, however, does not protect your site from comment spam as other plugins do and only works for registration pages.
The ability to add various extensions to WangGuard to further protect your registration pages from spam is a great advantage to this plugin. Extensions can be added to do things such as blacklist words, add a notice to further discourage spam registrations, or even disallow users that reference a particular domain from registration.
WangGuard does not require any API keys or external calls to their servers, but it does have the ability to obtain an API key to connect to their servers which will allow further spam to be blocked. The API key is free and can greatly affect the the amount of spam that is detected, as well as provide WangGuard with more information to better block spam registrations for other users.
This plugin is completely free and has a robust set of options to eliminate the majority of spam registrations on your WordPress site.
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Oooh. Is there a hacking protection article? And I recently found about “Wordfence” do they fall in the spam block camp or hack protection camp? looks really robust
WordFence is more of a security plugin. I suppose spam protection is a part of “security” however for the sake of this article WordFence wouldn’t be included. Spam comments are more of a nuisance. We’ll work on an article about WordFence shortly as well.
what about Cloudbric? my friend uses that. seems pretty good. I’d use it but I already have Akismet.
Hi John, Cloudbric is slightly different. It’s not so much to stop spam as it is for hacking attempt protection. But to be honest, we’re never used it. Thanks for mentioning it though, we’ll take a look and write an article with what we find about it.