Spammy content is harmful and undesired user content that you undoubtedly often deal with a large amount of it if you manage a WordPress website. If left undetected, spam can negatively affect a website's credibility.
There are numerous methods by which spam can enter WordPress websites. As a result, it requires a highly comprehensive solution to prevent it from accessing your website. So hopefully by reading this article, you will understand more about how spam content is delivered and effective methods to combat it effectively using WordPress plugins.
Why WordPress Spam is So Annoying
WordPress websites are commonly spammed by unwanted user content through user registration, comments, contact forms, posts, or other methods. It’s not only just annoying with the regular and automatic delivery of spam messages, as at some point the spam user content might compromise the web security that can also infect the computers of users who visit them.
Links to questionable or prohibited websites are frequently found in spam comments, messages, or other types of content. Spammers commonly target the WordPress comment system. Nevertheless, various WordPress tools and plugins are available to help filter and control spam.
The Key Components of WordPress Anti-Spam Plugins
Before you decide to choose a WordPress anti-spam plugin for your website, there are some key components that you need to understand, and they are
Type of Spam Protection
Spam Prevention Options
Security Alerts
Statistics and Reporting
Easy Integration
Captcha Settings
1. Type of Spam Protection
WordPress anti-spam plugins can sometimes have all-in-one features to eliminate spam from your website. However, there are anti-spam plugins that only focus on a few features, which will surely be lightweight to run and maintain spam filtering for your website. Be sure to identify the type of problematic spamming that you have so you can accordingly select the right type of spam protection offered by the WordPress plugin.
2. Spam Prevention Options
Look up the WordPress anti-spam plugin features that give you options to prevent spam activity on your website. Routinely scheduled scans, trackback validation, setting up blocking options, setting up anti-brute force login, user verification options, and many more options are just examples of effective prevention methods that you might need within an anti-spam plugin.
3. Security Alert
The security alert feature is a powerful component to protect your website from attacks. The plugin will send a notification or email you an alert if something significant occurs on your website. At a moderate level, some plugins can also alert you for new updates and the vulnerability of your installed plugins and themes.
4. Statistics and Reporting
It’s always important to have statistic and reporting features in your WordPress anti-spam plugin since you can review and analyze what kind of spam that you’re dealing with. These features also give you a list or log as an overview of whether you need to adjust some settings for your website security.
5. Easy Integration
The WordPress anti-spam plugin could have enhanced its performance with easy integration into other types of plugins. Integration to the major form plugins would come in handy when the anti-spam plugin is specially built to combat spam comments for instance. As we know spammers can send dozens of comments daily, it’s just impossible for you to manually remove them without an anti-spam plugin.
6. Captcha Settings
One of the common WordPress anti-spam features is Captcha settings. Captcha is considered to be an efficient anti-spam method that helps safeguard websites against spam bots and fraudulent form submissions.
However, some anti-spam WordPress plugins offer no captcha feature because the user experience can be severely affected by entering a captcha for comments, hence it should be prevented.
10 Recommended WordPress Anti-Spam Plugins
In this section, we recommend some WordPress anti-spam plugins that have the functionality to eliminate a specific type of spam or security threats as well as plugins that have rich features so it will help you to decide which plugins that will fit your need the most.
2-Step Verification
This plugin gives you the option to add 2-Step Verification or Two-Factor Authentification to the default WordPress Login form. It safeguards your WordPress website against phishing and password fraud. The configuration and setup are easy and quick without modifying the code. It sends email notifications of unsuccessful verification attempts.
Pros and Cons of 2-Step Verification
Pros | Cons |
Provide various verification methods, such as: Authenticator app code, Email code, Backup codes, SMS code, Secret question | Integration to WooCommerce and BuddyPress only provided in the pro version |
Option to set the user roles that can access the 2-step verification, either for all users or administrator | Option to select specific user roles that can access the 2-step verification only available in the pro version |
Enable the expiration time for email code and authenticator code |
Human Presence
If you’re looking for a captcha-free anti-spam plugin, Human Presence will do the work. The main reason is because of its technology including AI and Machine Learning. Instead of attempting to detect bots, Human Presence tracks the keyboard, mouse, touchpad, and other motion gestures to identify genuine users in milliseconds
Pros and Cons of Human Presence
Pros | Cons |
Removes spam submissions and prevents the creation of fake accounts in WordPress forms. | Protect 1 () form only in the free version |
Easy integration with the most popular form plugins | Integration is limited to WooCommerce review only, instead of other types of WooCommerce forms |
Operates in the background to monitor site traffic in real-time and analyze it, hence, invisible to users, also requires no captcha |
XO Security
Focusing on login-related security enhancement, the XO Security plugin provides several protection options for WordPress login. The plugin is open source and includes many functionalities to protect your website.
Pros and Cons of XO Security
Pros | Cons |
Login protection includes: limiting login attempts, login captcha, disabling login by email address and username, WooCommerce login, and changing the URL of the login page. | Not many options to integrate into WordPress form plugins. |
Provide Captcha and anti-spam for WordPress comments | |
Record login log and provide login alert |
Maspik
The plugin enables you to blacklist or block specific words, IPs, countries, languages, and more. Maspik blocks spam that ReCaptcha is not able to block. It doesn’t slow down your website since it’s written in high-quality code and not in CSS/JS, which reduces page loading speed.
Pros and Cons of Maspik
Pros | Cons |
Block/blacklist options for specific words, IP addresses, specific country or countries, languages, form spam email, text fields that have more than X characters, text area contains more than X links, email if it contains (or doesn’t contain) one character from the main site language, and forms devoid of source URL (Elementor forms only) | Limited integration to some WordPress form plugins |
Provide spam log for reporting, which you can clear at any time | Connection to private Spam API only provided in pro-version |
Easy integration with Elementor forms and Contact Form 7 | WooCommerce registration and review only available in the pro version |
Limit Attempts
It’s an effective plugin to protect your website from spam and brute-force attacks by limiting the number of failed login attempts per user and blocking user IP for a certain period based on your settings. The Limit Attempts plugin can add IP addresses automatically and manually to a deny list for management and monitoring.
Pros and Cons of Limit Attempts
Pros | Cons |
Add deny listed IP address to the htaccess file to reduce your website database workload | Limited integration and compatibility with some WordPress form plugins |
Provide a statistic list that displays the IP address, number of failed attempts, number of blockings, and status | Advanced deny/ allow list settings are only provided in the pro version |
Can send customizable notifications about blocked and denied listed users to user email | Compatibility to Captcha Pro, Captcha Plus, and re Captcha only available in the pro version |
Stop Bad Bots
When your website is slowing down because of bad bots and spam, this plugin will help you to eliminate them, since they consume bandwidth, overload, and hack your server. The stop Bad Bots plugin doesn’t require .htaccess or robots.txt to run. Additionally, no need to connect to any outside API or service, no DNS, API, or Cloud Traffic Redirection which will not slow down your site upon installation.
The bot visit statistics and protection status are displayed on the plugin’s dashboard. Optionally security alert is sent by email.
Pros and Cons of Stop Bad Bots
Pros | Cons |
Provide Bad Bots table or list which is auto-update regularly | Firewall protection only available in the pro version |
Anti-hacker extension integration | Bad Bots table auto-update is limited or less often for the free version |
Anti-spam functionality to protect Contact Form 7 and WP Forms plugin | |
Block options for various types of web threats |
Honeypot Anti-Spam
When you’re looking for an open-source anti-spam plugin with very minimal configuration, Honeypot Anti-Spam could be the best solution. The method provides a secret or hidden field to put into forms using javascript. A genuine visitor never sees this form and, as a result, never fills it out. Instead, spam bots identify it and fill it in, accordingly their comment or post to be flagged as SPAM.
Pros and Cons of Honeypot Anti-Spam
Pros | Cons |
Install and activate as there are no options or settings to run the plugin | Don’t work against manual spam |
Automatic against bots and it does not affect WordPress's normal operation | Can potentially trigger plugin conflict because the javascript is used to insert the honeypot field, although this rarely happens. |
User friendly since it doesn’t use a captcha |
SecuPress Free
What makes this rich-features anti-spam plugin so special is that it’s able to handle the automatic tasks which are securing the WordPress Core, protecting sensitive data, and performing scheduled security-related maintenance.
Pros and Cons of SecuPress Free
Pros | Cons |
Include the Anti Brute Force login | Security alerts and PDF reports are available in the pro version only |
Provide blocking to IPs, and visits from bad bots | Malware scans is a pro version feature |
Reliable spam and bots prevention by Firewall, malware scans, security keys protection, and Two Factor Authentication | Block country by geolocation is only provided in the pro version |
Detection of vulnerable plugins and themes is available in the pro version |
Blackhole for Bad Bots
You may create your own virtual black hole trap for malicious bots by installing Blackhole for Bad Bots plugin. It works silently behind the scenes to protect your site, hence your site is more user-friendly as you don’t need to add a captcha in your WordPress forms.
This plugin work by including a line in your robots.txt file that prevents all bots from clicking the hidden trigger link at the footer of your pages. Bad bots that then ignore or disobey your robot's rules will fall into the trap and are denied further access to your WordPress site.
Pros and Cons of Blackhole for Bad Bots
Pros | Cons |
Provide Bad Bots list and updates | Protection on Login Page needs additional code to the theme or child theme’s functions.php since by default Blackhole never blocks anything on the WP Login Page. |
Provides a setting to whitelist any IP addresses | It doesn’t support multisite yet |
Does NOT use or require any .htaccess rules | The automatic honeypot spider trap is only available in the pro version |
Provide security alerts by email |
BulletProof Security
This plugin provides many functionalities to make sure that your website is safe and secure. It’s a good plugin with a security checks wizard to perform when you are not familiar with website security settings. After installation, you’ll have a One-Click Setup wizard to take you to steps to automatically safeguard your website.
Pros and Cons of BulletProof Security
Pros | Cons |
Perform malware scan | Database and email monitoring are only available in the pro version |
Option to back up Database | The spam or bots quarantine feature is only provided in the pro version |
Provide security alert | Plugin firewall protection is only available in the pro version |
Provide spam/ security log |
