Spam and profanity are a big problem for anyone with a WordPress site. Whether yours is a simple website with a few pages or a multi-user platform that hosts tons of user-generated content, you need to be wary of both.
We’ve covered the best anti spam WordPress plugins on the blog before, and while spam may include profanity not all profanity is spam. Which is why we’ve put together this post!
While words “may never hurt you” as the nursery rhyme says, profanity can be harmful in a number of ways:
- Certain words may offend or out scare away readers. Why would a visitor to your site return when faced with problematic verbage?
- Profanity can tarnish your brand image. Excessive use of adult or offensive language can result in a decrease to online sales or your potential to attract viable partners. That’s right; companies may think twice about collaborating with you if your website is overly profane.
- Profanity can hurt your SEO. When you hurt your credibility with readers this becomes a trickle down effect to search engine results.
Of course there are exceptions to every rule, and depending on the type of website (or community) you run, profanity may or may not be a problem. For example what might be a mean b-word to refer to a woman on a couponing forum, might also be a totally normal word on a site about breeding dogs. Similarly, if you run a website targeting adults you may be a bit more lax when it comes to filtering out certain words than you would if you had a blog about Roblox with a younger audience. So use your own discretion when defining what is profanity and an acceptable level for your own site.
Below we will share three ways you can kick profanity to the curb to provide a better user experience, maintain your brand and potentially protect SEO for your WordPress site.
1. Enable Built-in WordPress Comment Filters
An easy and free way to prevent profanity on your WordPress site is to simply add a list of banned words to your site. Just navigate to Settings > Discussion and scroll to the Disallowed Comment Keys section.
Then just add your list of forbidden words, one word per line. Once you save, any time a comment containing one of the specified words is submitted it will be immediately sent to the trash.
If you would rather approve a potentially offensive comment then you can instead use the Comment Moderation section, so that a comment with a specified word is held for approval rather than deleted.
Pros: Completely free option and you can add specific words for comments to be moderated or deleted.
Cons: The process of adding every “bad” words is going to be very labor intensive, and it’s very likely you won’t get them all. Also, the way the WordPress moderation filter works is that it matches specified words always, even when they’re inside of other not-bad
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This article was written by Kyla and originally published on WPExplorer.