Time for another WordPress Wednesday! Weekly tips for new and established self-hosted WordPress users, designed to help you get the most out of your site from Sarah, a WordPress website developer.
Spam. Everybody gets it eventually, nobody loves it. It can be really frustrating to receive a “someone commented on your blog” email only to realise it’s a robot trying to sell you knock-off Chanel. I used to have a really big problem with spam comments on my personal site – for some reason I was receiving hundreds a day which was pushing me over my bandwidth allowance. Not cool, spammers. Not cool.
Thankfully, the combination of the following three WordPress plugins helped to stop the spammers in their tracks, and now it’s rare if I get one spam comment a month that slips through the net. If you’re finding that your WordPress blog is being inundated with spam try these plugins to see if they can help.
Best WordPress Plugins to Combat Spam Comments
Akismet
The original spam defence plugin, Akismet actually comes pre-installed with all WordPress sites. You have to activate it and for that you need an API key, but the instructions are pretty straight forward and if you’re a personal blogger you can get one for free.
AVH First Defense Against Spam
If Akismet on it’s own isn’t quite cutting it, then try adding AVH First Defence Against Spam to the mix. AVH pulls collective data on the most pervasive spammers and their IP addresses, so you’ll get the benefit of thousands of other people who are marking comments as spam. Useful!
Growmap Anti Spambot
Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin adds a neat little “are you a spammer?” style question to your comment form, to prevent the robots from even getting a chance to get your hopes up. You can customise the question, mine looks like this:
Fingers crossed with these three plugins installed you’ll never have to worry about spam comments again! :)
