Avoid a spam problem on WordPress

This guide details possible actions to combat unwanted content that may appear on your WordPress site when it is not sufficiently protected.

Preamble

• When your WordPress site is not sufficiently protected or monitored, spambots take advantage of it to use the comment system and drop thousands of messages (of course containing links to their fraudulent activities).
• Any form (contact, voting, booking, etc.) can also be used for malicious activities if nothing is done upstream to protect against it.
• This will affect your site (no one will file a serious comment), reputation the domain name, your activities and the server itself to the point of saturating it and impacting other sites in the same space.
• It is therefore essential to be concerned about the health of its site and to ensure its proper functioning throughout its life.

Combating Undesirable Comments

In the first place, follow carefully the solutions proposed by the WordPress codex You will learn for example that deactivate the comment system via the WordPress dashboard only works on future articles ; it is therefore important to follow one of the alternative methods proposed by WordPress for a more radical deactivation.

If you still want to collect comments, for example, you can limit them to registered users (be aware of official aid about the comment settings page) but it is therefore necessary to monitor the entries.

Fighting spam sending

Effective protection against robotic feedback and the use of any form on your site is to implement a captcha, or its alternative on honeypot (Honeypot). You will thus close the door to the bots (robots programmed to browse the Web and exploit its flaws).

Akismet, developed by Automatticcompany at the origin of WordPress, collects good reviews but becomes paid for a commercial use.

By installing WordPress on your Infomaniak site via the automatic installation system, you will find the extension WP Armour – Honeypot Anti Spam already enabled, in order to protect in its free version all types of forms, such as those of WP Comments, WP Registration, BBPress Forum, Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, Elementor Forms, Divi Theme Contact Form, WooCommerce Reviews Pro, etc.

If you want an alternative only dedicated to the contact form Contact Form 7, add its Honeypot protective extension.

Another extension has a lot of favourable opinions: The Sentinel Antispam !

The role of the host

You can learn more about the control mechanisms put in place by Infomaniak thanks to Article and FAQ about tools made available if you have a website.‍