Darcy Paterson Blog Four ways to prevent SPAM on your WordPress website
Four ways to prevent SPAM on your WordPress website
By [email protected] on November 1st, 2020
If you’re like me, your email inbox has a fair share of unwanted email from spammers. Here are four ways you can prevent SPAM from getting into your inbox.
Disguise your Email
To trick spammers from getting your email off your site, consider changing the symbols in your email to written words. For example, if your email is [email protected] rewriting it like brenda (at) bakedgoods (dot) com will fool spammers into passing it by.
Create a Substitute Email
This isn’t so much a trick as it is a concession to the fact that you’re bound to get SPAM not matter what you do.
Create an email using Gmail or Yahoo mail that you use for your user profile. Using this email on your account means you’ll check into it to see email’s from your visitors. If spam becomes too much in this account, simply delete it and start a new one.
Use Images Instead of Text
A way to disguise your email is to create an image of your email address. Use the ‘screen capture’ software on your computer. Cropping it to size with an image editor. Insert it into the place yor email would go.
If you use this method, remember it will interfere with users who use screen readers to access information. Since accessibility is important, consider including a contact form in addition to substituting your email with an image.
Anti-Spam Plugins
Many people like using anti-spam plugins for their WordPress website.
Email Address Encoder converts plain email addresses and mailto links into decimal and hexadecimal entities. CryptX does the something similar.
There are some drawbacks as if it’s not properly configured, they might mess with contact form where users introduce email addresses (if they make some mistake and the form is refilled and re-filtered).
Slash Admin, lets you have a little more control over the functionality of disguising your email.
My preferred method is to use the plugin Contact From 7 along with Google Recaptcha to add a level of determination for users who want to contact me via my website.