Did you know that spam accounts for over 80% of all emails sent globally? It's no wonder that spam is also a major problem for WordPress websites. Fortunately, there are a variety of anti-spam plugins available for WordPress users to help combat this issue. In this article, we will be taking a look at the 7 best anti-spam plugins for WordPress based on real-time statistics, to help you choose the right one for your website. With the help of these plugins, you can protect your website from unwanted spam and ensure a better user experience for your visitors.

1. Akismet Anti-Spam By Automattic - Anti Spam Team

Akismet Anti-Spam By Automattic is a widely-used and trusted anti-spam plugin for WordPress and WooCommerce. It offers robust protection against spam comments and submissions in contact forms.

This plugin works by checking all comments and contact form submissions against a global database of known spam, effectively preventing your site from publishing malicious content. You can easily review the comment spam it catches on your blog's "Comments" admin screen.

With Akismet, each comment has a status history, allowing you to easily see which comments were caught or cleared by the plugin, and which were marked as spam or unmarked by a moderator. URLs are also shown in the comment body to reveal hidden or misleading links.

The plugin also provides a discard feature that blocks the worst spam, saving you disk space and speeding up your site. Plus, moderators can see the number of approved comments for each user.

To use Akismet, you'll need to get an API key from Akismet.com. Keys are free for personal blogs, while paid subscriptions are available for businesses and commercial sites.

Overall, with over 5 million active installations and an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars from 972 reviews, Akismet is a highly effective and reliable anti-spam solution for WordPress sites.

2. Spam protection, AntiSpam, FireWall by CleanTalk

Spam protection, AntiSpam, FireWall by CleanTalk is an all-in-one anti-spam plugin that provides a comprehensive solution to protect your WordPress site from various types of spam, including spam comments, registrations, contact emails, orders, bookings, subscriptions, surveys, polls, and widgets.

This plugin offers a range of features such as real-time email validation, blocking disposable and temporary emails, and compatibility with GDPR regulations. It also comes with a built-in spam firewall that can protect your site against spam floods and crawlers, while hiding the "Website" field for comments and blocking messages based on languages, countries, networks, and stop words.

In addition, the plugin provides antispam protection for various forms, including WordPress, JetPack, WPForms, Elementor Website Builder, Gravity Forms, and Formidable Form Builder. It also offers a free trial and then charges a reasonable yearly fee of $12 for continued use.

With over 200,000 active installations and an average rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars from 2,634 reviews, this plugin has proven to be an effective and reliable solution for protecting WordPress sites from spam. It is also mobile-friendly and can give your site an SEO boost by preventing Google penalties due to spam.

Overall, if you're looking for a comprehensive anti-spam solution for your WordPress site that provides real-time protection against various types of spam, then Spam Protection, AntiSpam, and FireWall by CleanTalk is definitely worth considering.

3. Jetpack – WP Security, Backup, Speed, & Growth By Automattic

Jetpack by Automattic is a widely-used WordPress plugin designed to improve website security, performance, marketing, and design. Jetpack Security offers a variety of features, including 24/7 site security, real-time backups, and spam protection. Jetpack's brute force protection helps protect WordPress login pages from attacks. Additionally, Jetpack provides malware and security scans, and activity logs that record site changes and identify who made them. It also has downtime/uptime monitoring that alerts site owners of any changes via email.

Jetpack leverages the power of AMP to optimize site speed on mobile devices. The plugin's free CDN optimizes images, and its lazy loading feature delays the loading of media until visitors scroll down to the page, ensuring faster load times. Jetpack's video hosting allows for unlimited, ad-free hosting, making it easier for visitors to focus on content without getting distracted by ads or recommendations.

Jetpack has powerful tools for website growth, including advanced site stats and analytics, SEO tools for Google, Bing, Twitter, Facebook, and WordPress.com, and auto-publishing blog posts and products to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It also allows for easy management of Jetpack features from anywhere, including through its mobile app available for Apple iOS and Google Android.

Jetpack also offers a range of design tools, including themes, image galleries, contact forms, and subscriptions. It has oEmbed support to easily embed images, posts, and links from Facebook and Instagram. The plugin is fully compatible with WooCommerce and integrates seamlessly with other top WordPress plugins and tech products.

In conclusion, Jetpack is a comprehensive plugin that provides a range of features to improve website security, performance, marketing, and design. With a variety of options available for purchase, site owners can choose the features they need to optimize their sites for growth and success.

4. WP Armour – Honeypot Anti Spam

WP Armour is a plugin that uses a honeypot anti-spam technique to prevent spam submissions without using Captcha or extra verification fields that could be inconvenient for users. The plugin offers automatic anti-spam protection for various forms, including WP comments, registration, Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, WPForms, Formidable Forms, and more. WP Armour is GDPR compliant, and it doesn't track or store cookies or make external server calls.

WP Armour Extended is the paid version of the plugin that offers additional anti-spam protection and features. It includes two-level spam check and support for more forms, including WooCommerce Checkout and Registration, Easy Digital Downloads Checkout and Registration, Ninja Forms, S2 Members, and BuddyPress, among others.

The plugin logs spam bot IPs and blocks them if they submit multiple spam messages, adding an extra level of anti-spam filter based on IPs. WP Armour also allows you to view what spam bots are trying to submit, so you can be sure that the plugin is blocking legit spam bots.

WP Armour has over 100,000 active installations and an average rating of 5 out of 5 stars from 438 reviews.

5. Antispam Bee By Pluginkollektiv

Antispam Bee by Pluginkollektiv is a reliable and efficient plugin for blocking spam comments and trackbacks on your WordPress website without using captchas or sharing personal information with third-party services. This free and ad-free plugin is also 100% GDPR compliant, ensuring the privacy of your users.

Antispam Bee comes with a range of features and settings that allow you to customize your anti-spam strategy. You can trust approved commenters, those with a Gravatar, or set a comment time limit. You can also restrict comments to specific languages or block/allow commenters from certain countries. Furthermore, the plugin can treat BBCode links as spam, validate the IP address of commenters, and use regular expressions.

Additionally, Antispam Bee searches a local spam database for commenters marked as spammers and can notify admins by email about incoming spam. It can also delete existing spam after a certain number of days and limit approval to comments/pings only, deleting other comment types. You can select spam indicators to send comments to deletion directly, exclude trackbacks and pingbacks from spam detection, and optionally spam-check comment forms on archive pages.

The dashboard displays spam statistics, including daily updates on the spam detection rate and the total number of blocked spam comments.

Antispam Bee supports 27 languages and has over 800,000 active installations. With an average rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars based on 201 reviews, it is a popular and reliable option for WordPress users who want to keep their websites spam-free.

6. All-In-One Security (AIOS)  By All In One WP Security & Firewall Team

All-In-One Security (AIOS) is a WordPress security plugin created by the team at UpdraftPlus. It offers login security tools to protect your website from brute force attacks and bots, and a web application firewall to provide automatic protection from security threats.

The plugin also includes content protection features that help prevent comment spam and protect your content from being stolen by other websites. These features include iFrame prevention and copywriting protection.

The login security feature suite of AIOS includes several tools to enhance the security of your website. For example, it detects if an account has the default 'admin' username or if a user has identical login and display names, prompting the user to change this in support of better security practices. It also allows you to configure a custom URL for the WordPress 'Admin' login page, making it harder for bots to find.

AIOS supports two-factor authentication (TFA) with Google Authenticator, Microsoft Authenticator, Authy, and many more. It also includes a password strength tool that calculates how long it would take for your password to be cracked through a brute-force attack.

Other features of AIOS include a robot verification tool, which can be used to prevent spam registrations and user enumeration, as well as a general visitor lockout tool that can be useful while performing site upgrades or investigating security threats.

AIOS has over 1 million active installations and is available in 13 languages. It has an average rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars based on 1,381 reviews.

7. Wordfence Security By Wordfence

Wordfence Security by Wordfence is a popular WordPress security plugin that provides a comprehensive suite of security features to keep your website safe from malware and other online threats. The plugin includes an endpoint firewall, malware scanner, login security features, live traffic views, and more.

What sets Wordfence apart is its team of dedicated analysts who research the latest malware variants and WordPress exploits, turning them into firewall rules and malware signatures, and releasing those to customers in real time. The plugin also includes a real-time threat defense feed that provides firewall rules, malware signatures, and malicious IP addresses to keep your site secure.

Wordfence's endpoint firewall identifies and blocks malicious traffic, and its integrated malware scanner checks core files, themes, and plugins for malware, bad URLs, backdoors, SEO spam, malicious redirects, and code injections. The plugin also checks for known security vulnerabilities and alerts you to any issues, as well as scans your content for dangerous URLs and suspicious content.

In addition, Wordfence offers 24/7 incident response from a global team, with a 1-hour response time for priority customers. The plugin is available in 15 languages and has an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars based on 3,897 reviews. With over 4 million active installations, Wordfence Security is one of the most comprehensive WordPress security solutions available.

Conclusion

In conclusion, spam can be a serious problem for any WordPress website, but there are numerous plugins available to help combat it. The seven plugins we discussed in this article provide a range of effective solutions, from advanced filtering algorithms to user-friendly interfaces.

According to recent statistics, spam accounts for over 50% of all email traffic worldwide. As such, it's no surprise that spam is a major concern for website owners too. In 2023, it is expected that the number of spam emails will continue to rise, making it more important than ever to have a reliable anti-spam plugin installed on your WordPress site.

While these plugins can certainly help, it's important to note that spam prevention is an ongoing process. Website owners should remain vigilant, monitoring their site's traffic and implementing additional security measures as needed.

For those who don't have the time or expertise to manage their WordPress site's security on their own, we recommend hiring a WordPress development company. These professionals can provide comprehensive security solutions tailored to your specific needs, ensuring that your website stays safe and secure. With the help of a skilled WordPress developer, you can focus on running your business and leave the technical details to the experts.