5 Great Anti-spam Plugins for WordPress

Written by Casper Manes on January 9, 2012

If you’ve got a WordPress blog, you’ve probably come across spam. Spam in your comments, spam from your contact page, spam spam spam eggs and spam. (But I don’t like spam!) Fortunately, the world’s most popular blogging platform has one of the most diverse plug-in ecosystems, and there’s no shortage of plug-ins to help combat spam targeting your blog. If you simply search the plug-in gallery in your WordPress admin console, you’ll find (at the time of this writing) over one hundred and forty different plug-ins.

To help you out, I’ve compiled a list of five great ones; based on ratings, downloads, user comments, and my own experience with them. Take a look, and then consider adding these to your own WordPress blog if you are the victim of spam.

1. Spammer Blocker

With 4.5 out of 5 stars according to users, and >14K downloads, Spammer Blocker is more like a three strike law for spammers than anything else, save that it only gives spammers one swing. Whether another plug-in flags a comment as spam, or you manually do so, the source ip.addr of the offending comment is banned. It’s like the death penalty for spammers, in that there won’t be any repeat offence!

2. Better WordPress reCAPTCHA

With 4.5 out of 5 stars according to users, the almost 7K users of Better WordPress reCAPTCH are fans. This plug-in uses reCAPTCHA to identify humans from spamming bots, but with the ability to customise the look and the behaviour of the plug-in. You can use CSS to create your own look that better integrates with your blog theme, set your own messages for failed attempts, hide the reCAPTCH from logged on users, and more.

3. Fast Secure Contact Form

With 4.25 out of 5, but this one has over 2 million downloads. Fast Secure Contact Form replaces your WordPress blog’s contact form with one that can be customised and uses both CAPTCHA technology and the powerful Akismet plug-in (more on that below) to spam proof your contact form. You can set it up in seconds, or customise it to your heart’s content with custom CSS, e-mail validation, auto-responders, post submit actions, and more.

4. Spam Free WordPress

The 65K users think very well of this plug-in, which is rated 4.75 out of 5. It asserts near perfection, blocking 100% of spam with no false positives. It also forgoes CAPTCHAs, cookies, or JavaScript, placing less load on the WP database and on your users’ downloads.

5. Akismet

Akismet may rate a little lower, with only 4 out of 5 starts, but with over 7 million users (including me) it has fans galore. Brought to you by the same people who brought you WordPress, Akismet uses the power of the central servers that identify, learn, and track spammers and the comments, giving you much of the same power as many anti-spam solutions do for email. It learns as it goes, making it a very effective tool, and can be leveraged by other anti-spam plug-ins, like Fast Secure Contact Form (above).

With the combined power of these plug-ins at your disposal, you can easily run a WordPress blog that is virtually free of spam. And the best part of all of these? They’re all free. Free as in beer, free as in speech. Enjoy!

About Casper Manes

I currently work as a Senior Messaging Consultant for one of the premier consulting firms in the world, I cut my teeth on Exchange 5.0, and have worked with every version of Microsoft’s awesome email package since then, as well as MHS, Sendmail, and MailEnable systems. I've written dozens of articles on behalf of my past employers, their partners, and others, and I finally decided to embrace blogging and social media, so please follow me on Twitter @caspermanes if you enjoy my posts.

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Michael Delorme January 9, 2012

It’s pivotal to have some kind of spam solution running on a WordPress, where spam runs rampant and begets itself. I had no spam whatsoever on my personal blog, and then when it started to trickle in, it started a full-force avalanche that resulted at one point before I took action in 30 spam in the comments per day, which nearly tripled the number of actual visitors I was actually getting.

Hugh Robertson January 11, 2012

Of all these anti-spam plugins Akismet has the upper hand – both in features and user-friendliness. Akismet is so effective that I have not installed anything else on my WordPress blog and website. I’ve been using it for more than three years now and I have no complains about it.

But if you are a bit paranoid and want double protection, you can also try Disqus. It works great with WordPress and all other CMS platforms. Disqus can filter comment spams and encourage more interaction among your blog’s readers and followers.

Nate January 12, 2012

Spammer Blocker has many potentials, it’s also up and coming. With minor tweaks and some additional tools and features, Spammer Blocker would be a great addition to my WordPress plugin family.

My only suggestion is that this app should be updated more often. It’s last update was on November 19, 2011. The spam technology is constantly updated – so should this plugin.

Casper Manes January 12, 2012

Michael, agreed, the volume of spam seems more vertical than the page visit count.

Hugh, I love Akismet too, but frankly wasn;’t such of fan of Disqus. I’d rather allow anonymous comments (if a reader is so inclined) and never could get the hang of how to permit that with Disqus. For a members only forum it does seem to be the cat’s pajamas.