Top 10 Best Anti Spam WordPress Plugins

As a website owner, isn’t is exhilarating to see a growth in incoming traffic? Sure it is! We all have experienced it! However, when your site begins to gain traction, spam isn’t the nicest thing you enjoy. Heck, it’s one of the most unpleasant things you must tend to!

The moment your website starts getting a decent amount of traffic, a host of unwelcome spammers join the party. And most of these spammers are automated spam bots.

Well, let’s see. First off, if you don’t moderate comments (i.e. all comments are directly published without any approval) then your posts will be filled with thousands of irrelevant content (spam).

This will ultimately reduce your SEO score – all thanks to automated spam bots. but, if you started the moderation and daily you need to check a single relevant comment from thousands of irrelevant comments, That's too much time consuming and reduce the credibility of your website.

If you decide to manually moderate each and every comment, checking them for spam and authenticity, well, you’re going to need a lot of time. This technique has another disadvantage.

Apart from requiring significant human effort, your WordPress database keeps getting filled with spam comments. This weighs down your database and makes it slow.

Of Course, we have a number of solutions to this problem. In this article listed the best anti-spam WordPress plugins. You can choose any one of them (make sure you go through their features first) and enjoy the pleasures of hassle-free comment moderation.

List of Top 10 Best Anti Spam WordPress Plugins

1. Akismet (Free for personal blogs & Paid for commercial)

Akismet checks your comments and contact form submissions against our global database of spam to prevent your site from publishing malicious content. You can review the comment spam it catches on your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

Major features in Akismet include:

• Automatically checks all comments and filters out the ones that look like spam.
• Each comment has a status history, so you can easily see which comments were caught or cleared by Akismet and which were spammed or unspammed by a moderator.
• URLs are shown in the comment body to reveal hidden or misleading links.
• Moderators can see the number of approved comments for each user.
• A discard feature that outright blocks the worst spam, saving you disk space and speeding up your site.

PS: You’ll need an Akismet.com API key to use it. Keys are free for personal blogs; paid subscriptions are available for businesses and commercial sites.

2. WP-SpamShields Anti-Spam – All in One Spam Protection Plugin

An exceptionally powerful and user-friendly WordPress anti-spam plugin that eliminates comment spam, contact form spam, registration spam, trackback spam, pingback spam, and every other type of WordPress spam.

Leading edge WordPress spam protection, with NO CAPTCHAs, challenge questions or other inconvenience to site visitors. This plugin works silently in the background, and simply makes WordPress spam disappear.

Supports: Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, Ninja Forms, JetPack Contact Forms & Comments, BuddyPress, bbPress, WooCommerce, s2Member, WP-Members, Mailchimp, Fast Secure Contact Form, Formidable Forms, almost all WordPress forms, and almost all WordPress registration forms. Automatically!

3. WordPress Zero Spam

WordPress Zero Spam blocks registration spam and spam in comments automatically without any additional config or setup. Just install, activate, and enjoy a spam-free site. Zero Spam was initially built based on the work by David Walsh.

Major features in WordPress Zero Spam include:

• No captcha, spam isn’t a users’ problem
• No moderation queues, spam isn’t a administrators’ problem
• Blocks 99.9% of spam registrations & comments
• Supports caching plugins to help provide great performance
• Blocks spammy IPs from ever seeing your site
• Extend the plugin with action hooks
• Theme & plugin integration for any form on your site
• Optional logging, so you can see who’s trying to spam
• Advanced settings for complete control

4. AntiSpam Bee

Say Goodbye to comment spam on your WordPress blog or website. Antispam Bee blocks spam comments and trackbacks effectively and without captchas. It is free of charge, ad-free and compliant with European data privacy standards.

Feature: 

• Trust approved commenters.
• Trust commenters with a Gravatar.
• Consider the comment time.
• Allow comments only in a certain language.
• Block or allow commenters from certain countries.
• Treat BBCode as spam.
• Validate the IP address of commenters.
• Use regular expressions.
• Search local spam database for commenters previously marked as spammers.
• Match against a public anti-spam database.
• Notify admins by e-mail about incoming spam.
• Delete existing spam after n days.
• Limit approval to comments/pings (will delete other comment types).
• Select spam indicators to send comments to deletion directly.
• Optionally exclude trackbacks and pingbacks from spam detection.
• Optionally spam-check comment forms on archive pages.
• Display spam statistics on the dashboard, including daily updates of spam detection rate and a total of blocked spam comments.

5. Anti-Spam by CleanTalk

No CAPTCHA, no questions, no animal counting, no puzzles, no math, and no spambots. Universal Anti-Spam plugin.

Supports: Contact Form 7, Ninja Forms, Gravity Forms, MailChimp, Formidable forms, WooCommerce, JetPack comments and contact form, BuddyPress, bbPress, Fast Secure Contact form, S2Member, MailPoet, any WordPress registrations & contact forms and themes. Just setup and forget the spam!

Anti-Spam Features:

• Stops spam comments.
• Stops spam registrations.
• Stops spam contact emails.
• Stops spam orders.
• Stops spam bookings.
• Stops spam subscriptions.
• Stops spam surveys, polls.
• Stops spam in widgets.
• Stops spam in WooCommerce.
• Checks the existing comments for spam.

6. Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin

This plugin will add a client side generated checkbox to your comment form asking users to confirm that they are not a spammer.

It is a lot less trouble to click a box than it is to enter a captcha and because the box is generated via client-side javascript that bots cannot see, it should stop 99% of all automated spam bots.

A check is made that the checkbox has been checked before the comment is submitted so there’s no chance that a comment will be lost if it’s being submitted by the legitimate human user.

To combat the new ‘learning’ bots, this plugin adds dynamically named fields to the comment form so each post has a differently named field and value.

You can set the maximum amount of comments a user can have in the moderation queue to protect you from comment floods (provided you haven’t approved any of the spammer's comments before)

7. WPBruiser (formerly GoodBye Captcha)

WPBruiser is an anti-spam and security plugin based on algorithms that identify spam bots without any annoying and hard to read captcha images.

WPBruiser completely eliminates spambot signups, spam comments, even brute force attacks, the second you install it on your WordPress website. It is completely invisible to the end-user – no need to ever fill out a Captcha or other “human-detection” field ever again – and it just works!

Unlike other anti-spam plugins, which detect spam comments and signups after the fact and move them to your spam folder, which you then have to delete – using up not only your website’s resources but your time as well,

WPBruiser prevents the bots from leaving spam in the first place. The result is that your site is not only spamming free, but it’s also faster and more secure.

In addition, WPBruiser is completely self-contained and does not need to connect to any outside service. Your logins remain yours, 100%.

8. Spam Destroyer

Stops automated spam while remaining as unobtrusive as possible to regular commenters. The Spam Destroyer plugin is intended to be effortless to use. Simply install, and enjoy a spam free website

Spam Destroyer was designed to be as unobtrusive to your readers as possible. This lightweight plugin stops automated spam without putting off your commentors, and is something you might consider for a small blog or low traffic website.

9. WangGuard

WangGuard is fully compatible with Standard WordPress (non-multisite), WordPress MU, WordPress Multisite, BuddyPress (multisite and non-multisite), bbPress 2.0, and plugins like WooCommerce.

If you have signup enabled on your Standard WordPress, WordPress MU, WordPress Multisite, BuddyPress, bbPress 2.0, or ‘my profile’ in WooCommerce this is the plugin you were waiting for.

There is nothing like it, is a next-generation plugin associated a web service and a new concept of an active protection from sploggers, spam users, unwanted users, and Black Hat SEO. This is just the beginning.

WangGuard not only protects your site from sploggers, spam users or unwanted users, but WangGuard also cleans your database from them. No plugin or service does this, only with WangGuard you will get this feature.

10. Stop Spam Comments

Stop Spam Comments is a simple JavaScript-based spam comment blocker for WordPress. Just activate this nearly invisible plugin to start stopping spam dead in its tracks.

Plugin Features:

• Dead simple: no setup required, just activate it and enjoy your spam-free website.
• Lightweight: no additional database queries, it doesn’t add script files or other assets in your theme. This means your website performance will not be affected and your server will thank you.
• Invisible by design: no captchas, no tricky questions or any other user interaction required at all.

We covered a lot in this post, and hopefully, you’ll find some of it useful in your spam-blocking efforts. What’s your favorite way of combating spam? Do you know of an awesome antispam plugin we haven’t listed?

Let us know in the comments section below!