How to avoid spam in WordPress websites and tackle them?

WordPress websites are prone to malware and spamming as they are the most popular blogging platform and hence people like to exploit the most used part of the blog and that is comments section.

Bots and different spammers try to place their links within comments or use the website link area to have their scrupulous links on your website.

Your website then links their bad websites which might cause problems to you SEO wise as well.
There are various ways written by WordPress Codex on how to stop spamming on your WordPress blog based website and these techniques and security systems can surely make a lot of difference for your website in terms of stopping spam.

First is hardening security using .htaccess which will avoid all the problems you can have due to comment form and exploitation due to bots.

Secondly you can use the following plugins which are anti spam plugin in order to block bots and spammers including manual spammers so that they aren’t able to spam your site at all:

Akismet: Akismet is a great tool however for commercial sites it is paid for non proﬁt and non commercial and personal blog websites it is the best option available as it is developed by WordPress parent company Automattic and hence is recommend tool.

Comments Blacklist: Comments of several styles can be blacklisted and similarly comment authors can also be blacklisted by IP so that they don’t cause problem. But the major problem that happens is that if you block a shared IP you might be loosing genuine customers as well.

WP SpamShield Anti-Spam: WP SpamShield Anti-Spam plugin is a great tool for checking spam on not just comments but it is an all in one Spam prevention tool by preventing spam in contact form, and bbpress registration spam, WooCommerce reviews as well as other membership plugin forms as well. So basically not just comments but registration and contact forms also get protected using this plugin.

This is a smart plugin which does not involve any captcha and has 2 levels of blocking system:
a. Javascript Cookies and Anti Spam layer
b. Algorithm Anti-Spam layer

The ﬁrst layer rejects the bots but lets the humans pass through this.

The second layer checks for human spamming done by checking the algorithm calculations.
So this makes it very very smart in terms of stopping spam.

Anti-Spam: Anti-Spam is a great anti spamming tool for comments only where it does not involve any captcha and is the preferred way to just stop any type of comment spam. We have been personally using it and have found great results and effect due to use of this plugin which is hassle free and you never know it has been installed.

Other methods of stopping spam are simple like: Moderating Comments

a. In the Settings>Discussion panel one should select An Administrator should approve a comment before it becomes live. This will ensure that all comments go to moderation mode and does not go live without notice.

Captcha in Comments was another tool however most people avoid it nowadays because it involves additional step in adding comments for genuine commenters. Although it is still a prevalent method of stopping spam but is avoided nowadays mostly due to the explanation given above.

Conclusion: Free WordPress themes download is available which allows customers to use these themes for their blog sites and making use of the above techniques can prove worth while for them in getting your site free for human spam and spam bots.