How to Prevent Comment Spam in WordPress

Hi Tracy-

Thanks for the great question, Comment Spam is one of the oldest and most persistent problems for WordPress website owners.

There are a few ways you can fight spam comments on your blog. Here on BoldGrid.com, we use the Advanced noCaptcha & Invisible Captcha plugin as a first “wall of defense.”

This plugin has a couple of benefits, primarily that you can get all of the most important features completely for free. This is the familiar “I’m not a robot” checkbox, just like the one you checked when you asked this question, although there are also invisible options that don’t require your human visitors to interact with the checkbox.

It does take an extra step of signing up for a reCaptcha API key from Google, but the plugin makes this very easy by providing a link directly to the Google reCaptcha dashboard. You can get this key for free using any Gmail or gSuite account.

Some Spam still gets through reCaptcha, because there are still actual humans posting Spam comments out there, but it goes a long way to reduce the burden for you.

The other biggest way to fight Spam Comments is the Akismet plugin, and this is also where marking comments as “Spam” or “Trash” makes a difference.

By default, WordPress treats your Spam and Trash folders the same way, but when you’re using Akismet, you share a spam filter database with over 5 million other WordPress websites, and each time you mark a comment as Spam, that feedback is added to the database to improve it. Akismet will automatically sort spammy comments into your spam folder, and if you mark them as “not spam” then the false positive is also added to the database.

The only downside to Akismet is that it is not free to use for commercial websites, it’s only free for “Personal Blogs.” It is quite affordable, however, and if you’re spending more than about $8 worth of your time every month fighting Spam on your website, then I recommend making the investment.

Hi Tracy-

I’m sorry to hear you’re still having trouble with Comment Spam. Have you had a chance to see the previous reply above?

I checked out your site, for example on the post /carole-king-is-queen/, and I couldn’t find any evidence that a Captcha was enabled on that form. Double-check that your NoCaptcha plugin is enabled for your comment forms.

As for your emails being caught in Spam, the most common reason for this is that you need to set up SMTP authentication for your outgoing mail from your website.

By default, when WordPress sends mail, it uses your website’s administration email address (you can find this in Settings > General). However, that email address can appear as “spoofed” without SMTP authentication, causing it to get caught as Spam.

There are several plugins you can use to set this up. Check out this article for a more detailed explanation and some plugins we recommend.