Having a huge number of spam comments and registrations on your WordPress site can be extremely annoying. Let’s also remember the risks associated with spam and think of how to protect a website from spam because it is necessary for our safety.

What can happen if you don’t protect a website from spam?

Once a website is occupied by spam, then that website has chance of stressing the owners. Below are the dangers of spam

1. Harvesting of sensitive data. Spambots engage in malicious activities on sites by harvesting sensitive user information. Sites with spam often lose the trust of users
2. Unworthy monetary gains. Malicious users use bots to increase their chances of winning. This leads to financial losses from promotions. You must know that bots carry out a multiple numbers of registrations that could make marketing budgets shoot high
3. Change of credentials. Spammers often share links that may cause website owners to share their website login information. This can be phishing links that divert site owners to another page
4. Spam limits the number of visitors to your site. When crawling websites, there is a possibility of Google highlighting your website as dangerous because it has spam registrations and comments
5. Your site may be rendered off-topic. Spam comments are usually a contradiction of what the post is about. If you deal with jewelry but the comments are about construction, google will find difficulty in ranking your website

How to protect a website from spam

Websites without spam protection often become very dangerous to both the visitors and the site owners. Here are 7 ways you can protect your website from spam

Use an anti-spam plugin to protect a website from spam

Anti-spam plugins assist in blocking some registrations and filtering spam comments. They work by analyzing traffic behavior in a website from time to time by blocking bots. They further block contact form registration done by using temporary emails. You can use the list of plugins i have given below to protect your website from spam

Moderate comments and user registrations

Ensure that your website has a provision for approval of comments and registrations. In this way, you can identify spam registrations and block them, especially registrations whose emails have domain extensions from suspicious websites. Moderating comments allows you to either deny or accept a comment to be displayed on your posts

Use google reCAPTCHA

This Google feature helps in identifying activities carried out by bots and that of humans. You have encountered scenarios where you are told to flip the image in the right position. Bots can not easily do this however simple it is. This helps prevent spam registration

Make use of blacklisted words or disable comments

This will help you to avoid wastage of time in deleting unwanted comments. You can make a list of unwanted words in the comments or completely disable comments so that spammers do not get the chance to comment. Some sites may not require users to comment but rather just provide them with the knowledge they need

Use a web application firewall

Web application firewalls help in filtering threats that could lead to compromise, degrade or expose applications to denial of service attacks. Use a web application firewall like Cloudflare to manage the security of your site

Use the honeypot method

This method involves creating form fields that humans won’t be able to see. Once these fields are filled, then you can trap bots

User authentication and validation

Make sure that users are required to enter a two-factor authentication or verify their email addresses before submitting any form

Spam can be so annoying. It gives a site owner a feeling of discouragement of failure to manage their website and goes to the extent of affecting website traffic because sites with spam are ranked low