Spam sucks, no discussion.
You have to deal with moderating spam comments, form submissions, and user registrations.
But spam doesn’t stop there – it also wastes your server’s resources. This results in a smaller total load capacity (the number of visitors you can serve with an acceptable loading time) for your website.
If you have followed my security setup guide called “Still using WordFence? Improve your WordPress Security now!” then many bots aren’t even reaching your website, which means you will have reduced form spam and spam requests by a lot and basically eliminated registration spam – but for comments or contact forms there still might be some incoming spam.
Luckily you can eliminate pretty much all of the form spam that is left with minimal resource usage and around 10 minutes of setup time.
And those solutions are GDPR-compliant, unlike Akismet or CleanTalk.
Contact form and registration spam
Some forms have Google ReCaptcha support built-in, but if you’re concerned about GDPR then that’s probably not your best bet.
Let me introduce you to a GDPR compliant way of reducing form spam towards 0.
WP Armour
Works with a lot of forms (incl. Fluent Forms and WP comment/registration) and adds an invisible honeypot field through JS.
But be aware that you may run into issues when optimizing JS.
Comment form spam
WP-Armour also works with WP native comment forms, but as you might have understood from my security setup guide multiple layers work better than a single one.
The two following plugins will add more layers, basically making comment spam near impossible.
Antispam Bee
Antispam Bee extends further than just blocking spam, as there are some config options here including blocking comments depending on the commenter’s origin IP, the content of the comment, etc. – You should really check it out, I have nothing but appreciation for this plugin.
Adds an invisible honeypot field.
Forget Spam Comment
Forget Spam Comment is a Plugin by Gulshan Kumar that blocks spam by only allowing comments with a certain hash query string that is added by scrolling (adds around 0.2kb JS) through the page. An exact description is available in the video inside this article.
Be aware that you might break this when optimizing JS.
