Let’s learn how to stop spam comments on your WordPress website!
Spam has always been there, not just in form of comments but in form of a hundred different things.
There is SMS spam, video spam, technically you can pre-fix spam with any other word you want, and it’s there. That’s why I’m explaining to you today How to stop spam comments on your WordPress site.
WordPress is the most used Content Management System in the world, accounting for more than 25% of the total world websites! Well yeah, that’s true, 25% of all the global websites are powered by WordPress, now that is a big number.
So yeah if WordPress is so damn powerful, it’s not possible that it would just leave itself vulnerable to spam, right? Or else, it wouldn’t have made it this far.
So if you’ve ever wondered How to Block Spam Comment Bots in WordPress, then you’re at the right place.
What is Spam & Spam Comment:-
Spam is just the sharing of some material, any kind, for the sole purpose of promotion without any intellectual benefit to it.
Spam comments are comments on your blogs, which are done purely to get a backlink back to the commentator’s site, without any value to the comment.
For eg. the person might not have even read your post, and would still comment “Hey great post, please follow my website at www.something.com”, now that’s pure spam.
Why do People Spam:-
A couple of years back, backlinks were a big deal. They were the career makers or breakers of website owners. So yeah people needed backlinks, lots of backlinks. And the best way to grab them? Comments.
Well because comments were free, they were instant and mostly got approved. So why would anybody leave free backlinks out?
So yeah backlinks boosted rankings and traffic, hence people put up their website links in as many comment sections as possible.
How are Websites Spammed?
Are comments the only way to spam a website? Nope.
Comments are just one of the ways your website can be spammed. And hence most popular, that’s the reason why I took to writing this piece on How to Reduce WordPress Comment Spam.
But apart from them, there are “spambots” too. Bots are automated pieces of software that are programmed to carry out certain tasks, in this case, automatically comment hundreds and thousands of times on a blog with the attackers’ link.
Now, this not only makes your website look shitty, with all those comments, it also overloads the servers. Well because every time a new comment is made on the page, the server needs to re-load, right?
So if you’re on a limited bandwidth plan, or don’t have good enough servers, your site is going straight to its doomsday.
How to Stop Spam Comments on Your WordPress Site:-
Now there is more than one way to moderate comments on your WordPress blog! Of course, WordPress is advanced enough to let you tweak it for better security, right?
Moderating comments:-
This feature is “in-built” into WordPress. You don’t need the help of any kind of third-party application or plugin to enable this.
What we will be doing is, we will be enabling an “admin-check” on the comments. Meaning, the comments which are posted on our sites will show up and get published only if you/ the admin accepts them.
This way, you can check out the comments and allow only the genuine ones.
So okay, log in to your Dashboard, and click on Settings.
Then go to discussions.
Then click on the “
What you just did was, you enabled a feature by which you’ll have to manually approve all the comments you want to get published on the blogs. All the non-approved comments won’t be shown on the blog.
Additional Measures:-
On the same page, you can also see the “comment moderation” option, right? Make use of it.
Turn the “Hold a comment in the queue if it contains” option “2”.
What this will do is, it won’t let any comment with more than 1 backlink appear on the site. 1 link is fine, the person might be linking to his website as an introduction, but more than 1 link is 99% times spam! So they need to be moderated.
So there can’t be a better filter than yourselves, right? You read the comments out, check out whatever you want, and then if you feel that the comment was really meant for the post and isn’t spam, then approve it, or move it to thrash your choice.
Method #2 to Stop Spam Comments on your WordPress Site:-
Now WordPress didn’t make it to the top of the world alone. It had quite a bit of support. One of its supporters was the “plugins”! Plugins are extra bits of code that can be integrated with WordPress to enhance its features and potential.
One such plugin is Akismet. It’s the best, free solution when it comes to protecting sites against spam! So okay just hit the dashboard again, and click on the “Plugins” > Add new!
Now search for Akismet in the search box.
Click on the plugin when you find it, and click on Install! (In my case, it’s showing an update, because I’ve already installed it, but that’s exactly where your install button would be!)
Done! Once it’s installed, it would automatically start monitoring Spam comments for your site and won’t let them appear on it!
Quick Links-
- LG Google Nexus– Specifications And Pricing Details [Rumour]
- How To Use Podcasts In Google Play Music For Android?
- Top Free Copyscape Alternatives to Fight Content Scrapers
Over To You:- How To Stop Spam Comments On Your WordPress Website?
So that was all I had on How to stop spam comments on your WordPress site guys! I’m covered around 3 methods to answer questions like How to Reduce WordPress Comment Spam, right?
Hope they helped you. If they did, would you mind hitting the share button? Or hey if something messed up or you got questions, make use of the comment box! I’m all yours.
You can also use the comment box to let us know of some more simplified techniques that you might be aware of which help you reduce WordPress spam, if good enough, I’ll include them over here with proper credits to you.