WordPress spam filter - Akismet or Captcha?

WordPress spam filter - Akismet or Captcha? At the latest when you appears in the search engines, you get the first Spam comments. But not only spam comments, also form spam can be annoying. Deleting emails every day is a waste of time, because Akismet and Captcha can help. Both have their advantages.

WordPress spam filter - What is Akismet?

Akismet is a WordPressPluginwhich is spam through Comments and forms before it appears in the inbox. Akismet is a service that can now also be used professionally. You pay a regular fee as soon as you run a professional website. This is money well spent. For everyone else, however, the Akismet spam filter is still free of charge.

After you have installed the Akismet Plugin installed, you register on the website of Akismet and get a Api-code, which you then insert in the admin area. After that, you can rest easy for the time being.

However, you should check the filtered comments in Akismet regularly, because sometimes a comment ends up in the spam filter that doesn't really belong there. But then you can easily release it again. This type of false filtering can be prevented by using Captcha.

WordPress spam filter - What is Captcha?

Everyone actually knows Captcha. Maybe not by that name. As soon as you create an e-mail address on Google, for example, you have to enter a captcha code before you send the request. You usually have to do this twice because the captcha letters are difficult to read. However, that is also the idea behind it, because it means that machines cannot read these letters either. Fortunately, there are also plugins that don't show letters but turn Captcha into a simple math problem.

So if you have a captcha-PluginYou don't need Akismet anymore and you don't filter out comments that were actually serious.
On the other hand, captcha may prevent users from writing comments, which may discourage some users.

The best solution is to look at the various captcha plugins and then decide which one suits you best. Usually you have the same taste as your own target group. If necessary, you can also let your users decide and simply count the comments that are written over a certain period of time in comparison.

My recommendation is the Plugin called Captcha. The installation works simply via Plugins/Install and Activate.