7 Best Free WordPress Anti-Spam Plugins 2022

Running a website, especially when selling products on the net, you’ll receive different kinds of comments. But some unwanted messages are repeatedly posted on your site, which is rather irritating and crazy. Spam is always an annoyance to most people in modern life or web activities. Website developers are eager to avoid such kind of trouble effectively. Well, with the help of a WordPress plugin, it’s not that difficult to handle spam any more. Here is a list of anti-spam WordPress plugins.

Askimet

With more than 5 million downloads, this plugin belongs to one of the most popular anti-spam plugins on WordPress platform. It’s created and developed by Automattic Team, the company behind WordPress.com. Askimet has a set of anti-spam standards. Comments will be first submitted and checked through the Akismet cloud databases before they are published or thrashed to the spam queue. After installing and activating this plugin on your website, you need to get an API key to use its service. Well, it’s easy to set up then the tool works for you.

Main features:

1. Automatically checks all comments and filters out the ones that look like spam
2. 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
3. URLs are shown in the comment body to reveal hidden or misleading links
4. Moderators can see the number of approved comments for each user
5. A discard feature that outright blocks the worst spam, saving you disk space and speeding up your site

WordPress Zero Spam

This tool is also popular among web masters. Different from Akismet, this plugin does not require any API keys or additional settings. But it will block all spam comments or trackbacks automatically while you do not need to fill in any Captcha. This anti-spam plugin makes use of JavaScript logic shared by David Walsh. Anyone without JavaScript enabled will have their comments rejected. This plugin simply checks for bots and discards spam comments at the door before they reach your website, which greatly reduces spam comments and false positives. It’s very easy to use WordPress Zero Spam, just install, activate it and say goodbye to spam.

Main features:

1. No captcha
2. No moderation queues
3. Blocks 99.9% of spam registrations & comments
4. Supports caching plugins to help provide great performance
5. Blocks spammy IPs from ever seeing your site
6. Extend the plugin with action hooks
7. Theme & plugin integration for any form on your site
8. Optional logging, so you can see who’s trying to spam
9. Compatible with Contact Form 7, Gravity Form, Ninja Forms, BuddyPress and WPForms
10. Not compatible with Jetpack

Anti-Spam Bee

This effective and reliable plugin is also free, like WordPress Zero Spam, for personal and commercial websites, blogs in particular. And it doesn’t limit the number of websites you use the plugin on. It blocks spam comments and trackbacks effectively without captchas and without sending personal information to third party services and takes a log of spammers with Fail2Ban service. This plugin automatically validates the IP addresses of the commenter to be spam or not. Besides, Anti-Spam Bee cleans your spam folder periodically and automatically. But it doesn’t work with Jetpack, Disqus Comments and any Ajax-powered comment forms.

Main features:

1. Trust approved commenters
2. Trust commenters with a gravatar
3. Consider the comment time
4. Allow comments only in a certain language
5. Block or allow commenters from certain countries
6. Treat BBCode as spam
7. Validate the IP address of commentors
8. Use regular expressions
9. Search local spam database for commenters previously marked as spammers
10. Notify admins by e-mail about incoming spam
11. Delete existing spam after n days
12. Limit approval to comments/pings (will delete other comment types)
13. Select spam indicators to send comments to deletion directly
14. Optionally exclude trackbacks and pingbacks from spam detection
15. Optionally spam-check comment forms on archive pages
16. Display spam statistics on the dashboard, including daily updates of spam detection rate and a total of blocked spam comments

WP Cerber Security

WP Cerber Security is an all-in-one anti-spam solution that provides protection against spam, hacker attacks, and malware. It reduces brute-force attacks by limiting the number of login attempts thru the login form, XML-RPC / REST API requests, or using auth cookies. WP Cerber Security allows you to restrict access with IP Access Lists. And Google reCAPTCHA is used to protect registration, contact, and comments forms. At the same time, WP Cerber Security uses invisible reCAPTCHA for WordPress comments forms so that your real commenters will not be disturbed. Besides, this plugin can automatically detect and move spam comments to trash or deny them completely.

Anti-spam

Anti-spam by webvitaly is excellent in blocking automatic spam messages in comments section without captcha. Administrators do not need to change settings, and users do not need to type Captcha when commenting. But the tool blocks spam automatically with JavaScripts. It employs two blocking algorithms, “invisible js-captcha” and “invisible input trap” (aka honeypot technique). Its free version can block 100% of automatic spam comments and you need to use its pro version if you want to block spam comments submitted manually by spammers.

Main features:

CleanTalk

CleanTalk is a premium cloud-based spam filtering WordPress plugin that blocks spam comments without CAPTCHA, questions, animal counting, puzzles, math and spam bots. When a visitor submits a comment or registers, CleanTalk will send the action parameters to its cloud server that will cross checks with its database to get an idea whether it’s a spam or not. If it’s a spam bot, the comment will delete the comment or block the registration. If it is a visitor, the comment will be published. This plugin can block various spam types, and support various contact form plugins, and WordPress cache plugins. But it only provides 14-day free trial and asks for a license after the trial.

Main features:

1. Stops spam comments
2. Stops spam registrations
3. Stops spam contact emails
4. Stops spam orders
5. Stops spam bookings
6. Stops spam subscriptions
7. Stops spam surveys, polls
8. Stops spam in widgets
9. Stops spam in WooCommerce
10. Stops spam in Search Form
11. Blocks comments by country, stop words
12. Checks and removes the existing spam comments and spam users
13. Compatible with mobile users and devices
14. Compatible with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (EU)
15. Compatible with WordPress cache plugins
16. Compatible with WordPress contact form plugins
17. Real-time email validation
18. Blocking disposable & temporary emails
19. No Spam – No Google Penalties. Give your SEO boost
20. Mobile friendly Anti Spam & FireWall
21. Low false/ positive rate

reCaptcha by BestWebSoft

reCaptcha is a powerful security solution that can protect your WordPress website forms from spams while making it easy for real commenters to pass through. It can block spams from login, registration, password recovery, comments, popular contact forms, and many others. reCaptcha also allows you hide reCaptcha in your forms for certain IP addresses, and certain user roles.

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