Anyone who has a WordPress site knows spammers are a troubling factor with your websites online presence. Spammers not only disrupt your SEO, they can even scare away new clientele and can create a mess with your trackback files. Needless to say, sometimes a monthly payment for a decent spam blocker is out of the budget. We live by Akismet and pay $50 monthly (For unlimited sites) and it does start to add up.
Have a Personal Site not Affiliated to a Business?
Get Akismet Spam blocker – It is free for personal sites and we highly suggest you Use it. Enjoy your search is over! For everyone else, we have a little work to do.
Still want the Best Free Spam Plugin for WordPress?
It is WordPress, itself! WordPress actually has some pretty nice built-in features that you can use to block 90% of all of your websites spam. Here is what we do for all of our clients on top of setting them up with Akismet.
- Moderate your comments that through your site:
- Click Settings
- Click Discussion
- Scroll Down to – “Other comment settings”
- Check – “A comment is held for moderation”
I normally check and set – “Automatically close comments on articles older than [5] days” for new websites, until they start to increase in traffic. If you run a blog this is optional, but keep it at or above [14] days!
- Make sure you check your comments that may not be spam. Lets set this up:
- Scroll Down to – “E-mail me whenever”
- Check – “A comment is held for moderation”
If you have a new website make sure to check “Anyone posts a comment”. I do this because it makes it very easy for you to respond to a comment without watching your website 24/7.
- Moderate your comments that through your site:
- Scroll Down to – “Before a comment appears”
- Check – “Comment must be manually approved”
- Check – “Administrator must always approve the comment”
- If a comment has 1 or more links block it by:
- Scroll Down to – “Comment moderation”
- Set it to Hold a Comment in the Queue if it Contains 1 or More Links (Common tactic of spammers)
- Add a few blacklisted words:
- Scroll Down to – “Comment blacklist”
- Add My Short List and Feel Free to Add More (only use 1 per line)
www
http
url
ftp
sex
viagra
drug
pill
What Do You Think About the WordPress Built in Spam Blocker?
I hope this helps in your quest to stop and block spam! If you run across any other suggestions that I should add, feel free to comment below!
