How to Reduce Spam Comments in WordPress

In the starting of this blog on WordPress, we never had any difficulty with “Spam Comments”, we used to receive up to 5 to 10 spam comments daily which is usual for WordPress users. But suddenly, a few days back, we received 100+ spam comments every single day, it was full of a headache to delete these comments upon login to WP Dashboard all the time. The “Aksimet” and some other plugins keep the spam comments in a separate folder, but the problem is; you have to delete them because you don’t want the mess inside your dashboard. When our team got tired of it, we started searching for a solution, and also we tried to use every trick we knew regarding it. What we did so far and how we reduced the spam comments up to 60% in a week, we will be sharing my experience with you in this post.

Before starting this post, we will give you a brief how-to-do step to make the default settings inside your WordPress dashboard, so you can automatically reduce the spam comments in the starting of your blog, however, if you didn’t care, you might receive tons of spam comments from the first day.

How to Reduce Spam Comments in WordPress

Here are few changes you can make in your WP dashboard after installing “WordPress“, this will actually solve half of the problem and for the rest, we will be sharing my previous few days struggles to get rid of this shit

Plugins to Install for Detecting Spam Comments

#1. Please install “Akimset” Plugin for detecting spam comments, this plugin is actually installed by default with your WP installation, you just need to activate it and get the “Key” from its website for “Free“. It actually detects all the spam comments and put them in the “Spam folder”, you can delete them anytime you want.

#2. Install “Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin” which will add a “Confirm” Box at the end of your comment form, so if a comment is being posted by human that will only be possible by clicking the “Confirm” box, so it will not allow any “Software” or “Bot” to insert comments automatically. You can see the example of it in our comment form on this blog.

Make changes to the default WordPress Discussion

After installing above two plugins, now go to WordPress Dashboard >> Setting >> Discussion, you’ll find a page like below one, just make sure you keep the setting as strict as possible, because through spam or malware comments, people can destroy your blog within minutes and I’ve experienced it many times.

a picture is missing here. picture is about “comments settings”

You can keep the same setting as showing in the above picture, but we will recommend you to “Automatically close comments on articles older than 180 days” because the older articles get more spam comments than the newest ones. You can manually disable comments on the older articles by just clicking “Quick Edit” option in the posts list and disable the comments on a particular post. That’s also a good way to get rid of some spam comments, see the picture below for this:

So this is what you need to actually do for reducing spam comments, which I myself did in the starting of this blog. However, you need to take some more actions, in order to get rid of all spam comments.

To remove the URL field from the comment form

Now here is the magic that I used to reduce up to %30 spam comments in a single day, spammers mostly try to post comments for the sake of a backlink, which they usually insert in the “URL or Website” field in the comment form, you can see it here:

So as you can clearly see the visible “Website” field that is mostly used by spammers to create backlinks, and they put their website URL in the “website” field, what you can do to reduce the spam comments dramatically is to remove this field manually from the comment form.

To do this, just follow the below steps:

Copy this piece of PHP code and paste it inside “functions.php” file which you can find by going to Appearance >> Editor in your WordPress dashboard, just copy and paste the below code inside functions.php before the closing ?> PHP tag:

add_filter(‘comment_form_default_fields’, ‘url_filtered’);
function url_filtered($fields)
{
if(isset($fields[‘url’]))
unset($fields[‘url’]);
return $fields;
}

The above PHP script works on all premium & free WordPress themes, it basically adds a filter which removes the “URL” field from the comment form. So by doing this, you’ll reduce the spam comments up to 30% to 40%.

I’ve reduced the spam comments up to 60%, and you can do the same if you apply above tricks mentioned in this post. However, I’m sure, we will get rid of all spam comments very soon. we will be updating this post regularly with new tricks I implement.

For more information about How to Reduce Spam Comments in WordPress please watch this video: