How to Avoid Spam User Registration in WordPress 1

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WordPress has come a long way from being just a blogging site. With plenty of website owners choosing to use the platform to create their business websites, there have been countless instances of spammers trying to spread malicious code into people’s websites. Here are some tips to actively identify spam users from your WordPress website and put an end to it, once and for all.   

Spam can hurt a website both internally and externally as they can bloat up databases and it makes managing your WordPress website quite annoying. However, this does not mean WordPress is a bad option for blogging or creating a business website. It is, in fact, one of the best picks when you have to choose blogging platform options. All you need to do is select website builders that allow you to have complete access to your website and with a few simple tweaks, you can get rid of spammers for good.   

Here are some tips to avoid spammers: 

Enable ‘Subscriber’ as the Default User Role 

It is one of the easiest ways to safeguard your website from spammers. All you have to do is head to your General settings from the Settings page of your WordPress website. Here, you need to uncheck the Membership option and set it to Subscriber and check the ‘Anyone can register’ option. This will allow anyone to make an account for your WordPress website, but they will not get any form of Dashboard access unless you manually assign permissions to them. 

CAPTCHAs 

CAPTCHAs are highly effective, but they can also be slightly inconvenient for users who are not spammers. It requires your users to solve simple math that would otherwise fool spambots. You can download from a host of 
CAPTCHA plugins for your website like reCAPTCHA or CAPTCHA by BestWebSoft to deter spammers.   

CAPTCHAS work in WordPress login pages, password recovery pages, comments as well as any contact form you may have on your website. They are also very easy to solve, with the plugins allowing your users to change the question if they find it too difficult to fill in. You can also configure the difficulty of the CAPTCHA questions, but, it will also make the user experience worse as people would need to sit and spend time on difficult questions. The easiest version of CAPTCHAS involves entering letters or numbers displayed on an image in a text field, which also happens to be the most commonly used CAPTCHA type.

Honeypots 

Honeypots come in the form of plugins that allow you to block spammers just like CAPTCHAs do minus the hassle of your users having to input any additional codes to access your website. Honeypot plugins are user-friendly and are hidden in pages of a website that have registration forms. They are invisible to normal users, but when spambots access them, they spot invisible fields in the form and fill them up with spam data. Any spam input will trigger the honeypot plugin and the requests from the spambots are immediately rejected.   

Some of the popular honeypot plugins include Contact Form 7 Honeypot, WP-Honeypot, and WP-SpamShield Anti-Spam. These plugins are very easy to setup and work with a variety of other form plugins to help you set up registration forms for your website without a hassle.

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