Preventing spam in a WordPress website is a very imperative and crucial task. For many WordPress Websites, automated spam is nothing new because many websites allow comments on the blog posts and thus become a target of the spammers. Luckily, there are many simple steps that help in preventing spam on the WordPress Website.

Need Moderation

Many people post comments on the blog post for getting backlinks. If a comment contains more than two links, then hold it for moderation. Tick on the comment approval before a comment is seen in the blog post. Also, you can select automatic comment approval if the comments have been approved previously by a particular user.

Automatic Spam Detection Plugins

After the completion of the first step, you will see numerous comments held for moderation daily. These are all spam and this means that you are just wasting your time by digging over a junk bunk for finding out the real comments. To avoid this, anti-spam plugins are very useful. These plugins detect the spam automatically and make sure that you will not receive any spam messages for approval. There are different factors that allow you to know whether the comment is spam or not.

Activate Akismet

The very popularly used anti-spam plugins are Antispam Bee and Akismet. Akismet is the most recognized WordPress anti-spam plugin that filters spam automatically. It comes with pre-installed WordPress so you do not have to waste its time on installation. You just have to activate and enter the API key of the Akismet for filtering your spam comments. The personal plan of Akismet is free and is enough to prevent your WP website from spamming.

Certainly, these plugins are good in spam detection but are not perfect. So ensure that you have a proper understanding to judge the difference between spam comments and genuine comments.

CAPTCHA and Quiz Plugins

There are many chances when the contact form of your website becomes a target of spammers. For that also, there is a help called CAPTCHA. When using contact form plugins, make sure that the option to enable CAPTCHA is there. This is a kind of box with garbled letters that gives five tries to the user for entering the letters correctly.

The quiz plugin can also help in reducing spam comments by allowing users to answer a question prior to every comment. These are very useful plugins for WordPress site spam comments detection because it allows users to act like a human but not like a spam bot.

Disable Trackbacks and Pingbacks

Trackbacks are the comments that contain the same content you have written in the post. Both trackbacks and Pingbacks are communication technology, allowing notification of the links from other blogs. Most of the comments in these are spam. To prevent spam, uncheck "Allow Pingbacks and Trackbacks" from the dashboard by clicking on Dashboard -> Settings -> Discussion.

By following the above-mentioned steps you can easily prevent spam, comments on your WordPress site and can make it more safe and sound.