How to reduce spam on WordPress

Let’s face it, blogs and websites are major sources of information and entertainment these days. In fact, many people try setting up their own websites or blogs for personal or private use or for other purposes like advertising, marketing, or promoting a good cause.

The sad reality however, is that maintaining a blog or website is not that easy. One of the most frequent problems you can have is the occurrence of spam. Spam is really bad for your site. Fighting spam on your WordPress blog could be a difficult task most times. Today i am going to share with you how i fight spam on my WordPress blog and i hope you will find it useful as well.

How to reduce spam on  Wordpress:

Well, here’s good news. If you’re using WordPress, there are a number of ways in which you can minimize spam. Please note that you may never be able to totally stop spam on your WordPress blog but you can reduce it to its barest minimum. Here’s how:

1. Lessen the number of links on your site: By reducing the number of links on your WordPress blog, you are also reducing spam. Spam would easily come in the form of links posted through comments. It’s hard to manage it but you can try. Here’s a tip- under the blog site’s settings, see to it that you only limit the number of links WordPress can hold. In fact, you can even limit this to only one.

2. Post comments from registered users only: Spammers would easily be able to post spam in the form of comments and links in your blog. So in order to stop them, why not require users to register first before you can let them post their comments? It’s the first stage of screening process. Another way to make sure that you post legitimate comments is to allow only those users whose comments have been approved previously. WordPress contains settings which enable it to automatically approve comments from registered users only. Think of this as a strategy for blocking spammers from your site.

3. Close comments in your site: Another frequent problem you may encounter in WordPress is the occurrence of spam through comments. So as much as possible, close comments after a certain time. You can adjust how long comments will appear on your WordPress through its settings; say one to two days only.

4. Filter URLs and emails from your blog: Finally, in order to reduce spam on your WordPress, you can opt to block websites and emails containing spam or those which are potential sources of spam. Try to check your blogsite on a regular basis so that you can immediately block spam before they increase in number. You can do this by making some adjustments on your blog site’s settings.

5. Use Plugins: There are quite a lot of plugins that can help you fight spam, popular spam fighting plugins includes Disqus, IntenseDebate, Livefrye, Akismet, WP-Spam Free, SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam ,NoSpamNX, ReCAPTCHA, Bad Behavior, Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin etc. These plugins can help you reduce spam to a minimum. Try some of them.

You can only maintain your blog site’s quality if you successfully reduce spam. So if you want to drive more traffic into your site, it’s time you apply these tips. These method should be of great use to reduce spam comments significantly, do let me know of any other method that can be used to reduce spam on WordPress using the comment form below.

This post was written by Lauren Tessin of MyGetRidOfGuide, is a website that can offer several solutions to your most unwanted problems. If you liked this post, please share this post with your friends using the share tools on the left hand side of the browser or the ones under this post. Please if you haven’t liked our Facebook page simply click on the “Like” button on the right hand side of the browser. You can also follow us on Twitter right under the Facebook page.

I hope you read my blog post on “How to tackle comment spam on WordPress“. If you like this blog posts Subscribe to NetMediaBlog Feeds by Email so you can be getting more of my posts on your email even when you are offline.