The most annoying people for bloggers/website owners are the spammers. They just post a spam comment and leave off. The comment will be completely irrelevant to the post. If by mistake the blogger accepts the spam comment, then it will be disturbing the other readers of the blog and ultimately the blogger will loose some of this audience. So, he needs to be very careful with spammers.
Luckily for WordPress users, we have an awesome plugin to tackle this complexity with ease. It’s called Akismet.
This plugin is actually developed by Automattic, the same company which developed WordPress. You can get to know more about this company here.
Table of Contents
Plugin Stats:
The following image will let you know how popular and trustworthy this plugin is.
This plugin is being used by more than 3 million websites and I will be explaining how to install and use this plugin below.
Install Akismet Plugin:
The first step is that you need to install Akismet Plugin.
If you are new to WordPress and have no idea, how to install a WordPress plugin, you can refer this tutorial.
Setting up Akismet Plugin to stop spam comments:
Once, you activated the plugin, you will see a notification at the top of your screen.
Click “Set up your Akismet account”
Or
You can directly go to Settings -> Akismet in your WordPress dashboard.
In the Akismet plugin page, you could notice that you will be requested with an Akismet API key. This API key is very much essential to activate Akismet plugin. Now, I will tell you how to get this API key for free.
Just click “Get API key” button and you will be taken Akismet website.
You will find this saying “ Say Goodbye to comment spam” on their website.
Just click “ Get an Akismet API key” button or “ Get Started” button.
You will be taken to a page with their packages and pricing. Here are their packages.
There are four plans.
- Basic
- Plus
- Premium
- Enterprise
Plus and Premium packages might be useful for high-end websites. We will be going on with the Basic plan for our website. The basic plan is more than enough for us.
Now, you will be taken to a Payment page. Here, you will find a slider mentioning $36/year as your plan for Akismet. Change it to 0$ / year and click “Continue” button.
Now, you get a dialog box, with an option to activating Akismet plugin. Just click “ Activate this Site” option.
You will be brought back to your website’s Akismet plugin page.
Here, you will have to choose how Strict Akismet plugin has to deal with Spammers. It’s by default set to “ Silently discard the worst and most pervasive spam so I never see it”.
This option will directly delete the spam comments and you will never come across it. And the next one is that “ Always put the spam in the spam folder for review”.
This option will actually send the spam comments to a separate folder called Spam folder. And, the comments older than 15 days will be deleted automatically.
I actually put the spam comments into the spam folder and check that before deleting. If you are a busy blogger with thousands of spam comments, you will have to go with the first option.
And don’t forget to click “Save Changes “.
Video Tutorial:
You can also watch the same as a youtube video.
[youtube www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk71y5BlmmE]
Conclusion:
That’s it. You have successfully set up Akismet plugin on your website. Now, this plugin will take care of everything. You could do your blogging peacefully.
Comment below, if you have installed Akismet plugin on your website. If you find this tutorial useful, share it with other bloggers too.
And don’t forget to add this pin to your Pinterest Board.
Here are more useful WordPress Plugins for you:
Thank you so much for this tutorial to stop spam comments. But even after installing this plugin, I could see spam comments regularly in the spam folder. How to prevent this? Any other solution?
That can be avoided by adding Captcha to your comments. By this way, you can eliminate a lot of spam comments. But still not a way to eliminate 100% spam.
Hi Nirmal. Thanks for this really useful blog post. I am finding this so useful.
I am so glad to hear that, Richard 🙂
Thanks for the post. But how can I add a captcha to my comments section?
Adding Captcha to your comments is not a feature of Akismet. It depends upon the comment plugin you are using. By the way, what plugin are using for Comments?