If you have a WordPress site, form spam is a constant issue. Whether it’s people spamming your contact forms or leaving spam comments on your blog, you’re probably a lot more familiar with spam than you’d like to be.
If you want to reduce WordPress spam submissions, you can find a number of plugins and tools. However, not all tools are created equal and many tools use different approaches to blocking spam submissions.
For example, some tools require users to pass a test before they can submit a form (AKA a CAPTCHA), while other tools work quietly in the background without affecting your site’s frontend experience.
In this post, we’re going to compare three popular and effective WordPress anti-spam plugins and solutions – Human Presence vs Akismet vs Google reCAPTCHA.
All three can do a good job of reducing spam on your site, but there are some important differences that might make one tool better than another for your situation.
Let’s dig in!
Introductions
To start off our comparison, let’s go over some quick introductions to these plugins.
Human Presence
Human Presence is an anti-spam plugin that protects your forms while running invisibly in the background. To stop spam, it does two things:
- It looks for “human markers” to make sure a submission comes from a real human.
- It looks for “bot markers” to try to detect bots.
By coming at the problem from both directions, it’s able to stop spam without inconveniencing your legitimate visitors.
If it does detect a spam submission, it will block the submission outright. Otherwise, nothing will change about the frontend experience of your site.
Akismet
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This article was written by Colin Newcomer and originally published on WP Mayor.