How to prevent spam comments on wordpress site – Stop spam

How to prevent spam comments on wordpress siteYour wordpress blog is more legit and resourceful and so you should take more advantage in protecting your wordpress blog from hackers and spammers. We have discussed how to prevent wordpress site from being hacked and discussing a lot. Now it’s time to protect wordpress site from spammers. In this post you will learn how to prevent spam comments on wordpress site.

How about deleting spam comments manually each and every day? When you start a new wordpress blog and start posting you will notice your blog start receiving more comments. Most of the comments you see are not real people and all those comments are not precise. At the beginning you can start deleting spam comments manually, but later on you need to spend most of your time on deleting spam comments rather than posting. So it’s better to prevent spam comments on wordpress site.

Related: how to password protect wordpress admin directory

How to prevent spam comments on wordpress site

Step 1: Disable pingbacks and trackbacks

You will see some comments having content you written in your post (excerpt of the content) and these are trackbacks. Pingbacks and trackbacks both are communication technology which allows link notification from other blogs. There is not much to deal with that and most of them are spam. So better is to uncheck “allow pingbacks and trackbacks” from dashboard >> settings >> discussion.

How to prevent spam comments on wordpress site

Step 2: Moderate all comments

Most people comment on several blog posts for the purpose of getting backlinks. Hold a comment for moderation if it contains 2 or more links. Enable to approve the comment before a comment appears in your blog post and also you can set the comment to approve automatically if the commenter has previously approved comments. All this you can override at discussion settings.

How to prevent spam comments on wordpress site

Step 3: Activate Akismet (Anti-spam plugin)

How to prevent spam comments on wordpress site

Last but not the least….If you followed our post on highly recommended wordpress plugins then you will be activated Akismet. Akismet is a best wordpress anti-spam plugin that automatically filters spam comments and trackbacks. Akismet comes pre-installed with wordpress so you don’t have to install. Just activate and enter your Akismet API key to filter your spam comments. You can get Akismet API key from here. Sign up for personal plan which is free and more than enough to prevent spam comments on wordpress site.

Additional tip to prevent spam comments on wordpress site

How to prevent spam comments on wordpress siteUse CAPTCHA solving before “submit comment” button. You can display randomly generated images using this plugin SI CAPTCHA for wordpress. Also you can use Quiz plugin which reduces spam comments by asking users to answer the question before commenting. These plugin can prevent spam comments on wordpress site by proving visitor as a human and not as a spam bot, but it will irritate the regular commenter to your blog. Also see math comment spam protection which adds simple mathematical question before submit button.

To prevent spam comments on wordpress site the most important thing you should follow is the step 3 Activate Akismet which does a great job in preventing spam comments. If you have any tips to mention about preventing spam comments please mention below.