Understanding how to set up the Akismet WordPress plugin, a crucial anti-spam tool for WordPress users, can protect your site from unwanted comments. This step-by-step guide aims to assist WordPress site owners in establishing a spam-free platform.
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Understanding Akismet Anti-Spam Plugin
Before setting up the Akismet WordPress plugin, let’s comprehend what this tool does. Essentially, Akismet is a globally recognized anti-spam plugin. It examines your site’s comments and contact form submissions, contrasting them against a comprehensive database of spam content. It separates valid comments from spam and discards the most harmful ones, saving you valuable time and enhancing your website’s performance. Akismet can be considered a filter that examines the massive volume of feedback, trackbacks, and pingbacks your site receives for potentially malicious or spammy content.
Here’s a more in-depth look at what it does:
Spam Detection: Whenever someone submits a comment on your WordPress blog or fills out a form, Akismet checks it against its global spam database. It considers many factors, such as the originating IP address, the comment’s content, and other metadata.
Content Filtering: Akismet separates legitimate comments from spam, which can help your site run faster and smoother. It also saves you time by not manually examining and removing spammy comments.
Status History: The plugin offers a status history for each comment so you can know where each piece of spam came from. It’s a helpful tool in understanding what kind of content is being marked as spam.
Discard Feature: The discard feature blocks the worst spam without you intervening, saving you disk space.
Akismet comes built-in with WordPress installations and is a valuable tool for any site owner who wants to manage and block spam comments efficiently. This can ultimately help maintain the integrity and quality of conversations on your site. While Akismet is highly effective, no anti-spam tool is 100% foolproof, and manual moderation may still be necessary occasionally.
Installing the Akismet WordPress Plugin
You can install the plugin using our WordPress Plugin Installation Guide article of our Complete SEO Guide Box. Remember that this plugin comes with a fresh install of the latest WordPress versions.
Search for: Akismet Anti-Spam: Spam Protection By Automattic – Anti Spam Team
Setting Up Your Akismet WordPress Plugin: Registering and Using API Key
Login to your WordPress Dashboard.
Hover over the [Settings] button on the left menu bar with your mouse cursor. In the dropdown menu, click on [Akismet Anti-Spam].
Click on [Set up your Akismet account] on the Akismet plugin settings page.
A new browser window will open on the “Pricing” page.
In the left option “Personal,” Click the [Get Personal] button.
On the new page, you will be asked how much you want to pay yearly.
If you slide the payment slider all to the left ($0 / YEAR), you will need to check all the checkboxes that agree to non-commercial use of the plugin, and you will have no advertisements on the site. If you want your site to be non-commercial, then this is your plan, and you can use the Akismet plugin for free. If you’re going to use Affiliate Links or Advertisement Networks, you can’t use the free option.
You need to move the slider one tick to the right, which is the cheapest option to buy the plugin usage rights.
Click [Continue and pay].
You will navigate to the Checkout page.
Please fill out the form with the email we opened for all the service registrations for our site.
Click continue to enter the payment method and click pay.
After the process ends, you will navigate to the new page with the API Key.
Copy the text box where it states, “Your Akismet API Key is.”
Return to your WordPress Akismet Settings page.
Click “Manually enter an API key.”
Paste the API key.
Click [Connect with API key].
From now on, you will see the Akismet plugin settings.
Setting up the Akismet WordPress Plugin
Your settings should look like this:
Comments: [ ] Show the number of approved comments beside each comment author.
This can be useful for moderators or site administrators to gauge the commenting history of individuals on their site quickly. This feature might help identify genuine commenters from spammers or new participants, thus aiding in managing comments more efficiently. However, it will add data to the database, making the site potentially slower and affecting SEO, and this is not a necessary feature. Also, in our Complete SEO Guide Box, we recommend turning off users’ names and emails in the comments section, making this feature useless.
Strictness: (*) Silently discard the worst and most pervasive spam so I never see it.
The spam that Akismet considers the worst will be deleted right away. From our experience, there was no single comment that Akismet caught that wasn’t spam. So you can set this setting without fear that valuable comments will be removed. On the other hand, if you want to see the comments and approve or delete them by yourself, you can select the “Always put spam in the Spam folder for review.” option. This way, the comments will be put in the Spam folder for review for 15 days and removed automatically afterward.
Privacy: (*) Display a privacy notice under your comment forms.
To be GDPR law compliant, enable this option. This will show a message under the comment section that your site uses Akismet to prevent spam with a link to Akismet’s Privacy Policy.
Click [Save Changes].
Using Akismet
Usage after setting up the Akismet WordPress plugin:
On the left menu bar, click [Dashboard].
The Dashboard is the homepage of your administration panel.
Find a widget with the name “At a Glance.”
Inside this widget, you will see how many spam comments Akismet blocked and a link to your comment Spam queue to check the incoming messages, if there are any.
You can also reach the Spam queue from the left side menu by clicking on [Comments].
Then click [Spam] on the top menu of the “Comments” page.
WordPress.com Account
When you register for Akismet, the process automatically creates an account for you on “wordpress.com”. You should receive another email asking you to confirm registration. We don’t use “wordpress.com,” so it is up to you to confirm it.
If you find any mistakes or have ideas for improvement, please follow the email on the Contact page.