How to Set Up Akismet Anti-Spam on WordPress Site

The comments feature plays an essential role for your site visitors, no matter what site you have: people can discuss your blog posts, leave reviews on products pages, etc. Comments can even improve your site’s SEO. When you start a WordPress site and allow comments on your pages, you should consider adding protection against comment spam: spam messages usually consist of advertisements or links to suspicious websites. With that being said, to protect your website from such junk, you need reliable protection. While there’re many solutions to combat comment spam, every WordPress site has a free solution included by default – it’s called Akismet Anti-Spam.

Akismet Anti-Spam is a simple WordPress plugin installed on every WordPress site. However, you first need to activate it and set it up to use it. This tutorial will provide you with the complete setup process for the Akismet Anti-Spam plugin to ease the maintenance of your site’s comments.

What is Akismet Anti-Spam

Akismet Anti-Spam is a cloud-based freemium application created by Automattic. It is designed to protect a site’s commenting system from spam coming from automated bots and human spammers: the application filters all submitted content before it reaches your website, so you don’t have to check spammy content manually. But, of course, no anti-spam solution guarantees complete protection against spam as malicious bots constantly evolve and get smarter to overcome such defenses. Therefore, you can’t expect all spam to go away once you set up an anti-spam application: sure, it helps fight spam, but it can’t prevent it.

As I mentioned before, the Akismet Anti-Spam plugin was created by Automattic, the same company behind WordPress.com. While this plugin has its main objective to fight against comment spam, we can further expand its functionality to block spam on contact forms and other site areas through additional WordPress plugins: the Akismet service is integrated into many popular WordPress plugins such as Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, Jetpack, etc.

Akismet uses an external database to examine submitted data, and if that data is identified as spam, it will be removed from your site. Like any antivirus software, the service’s algorithm may report false positives (false alarms), so you should regularly pay attention to filtered messages.

How to Set Up the Akismet Anti-Spam Plugin

To start using the Akismet Anti-Spam plugin, we must activate it and enter an API key.

As I said earlier, the Akismet Anti-Spam plugin is installed on every newly deployed WordPress site by default. To check if the plugin is installed on your site, log in to your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins → Installed Plugins, and look for the Akismet Anti-Spam plugin. If you find the plugin, click Activate.

Otherwise, if you can’t find the plugin, you need to install it: go to Plugins → Add New, search for Akismet Anti-Spam, then click Install Now and Activate.

After activating the plugin, go to Settings → Akismet Anti-Spam and click Set up your Akismet account.

You need to select your preferred Akismet subscription plan: the service is free for personal use and paid for commercial use. Choose the Personal plan if you won’t put ads, sell services/products or promote businesses on your website. Otherwise, choose a commercial plan if your goal is to make money. In this tutorial, I chose the Personal subscription plan.

On the next page, fill out your data, and under What is Akismet worth to you? move the slider to the very beginning to use the service for free, or choose the amount of money you want to pay.

After signup, you’ll receive a verification code to your provided email address to verify your account – paste the confirmation code into the form and click Continue. After the verification, you’ll get additional instructions to complete the setup process.

As the instruction specifies, check your email to find an API key. If you don’t receive an email, you can find the API key in your Akismet account dashboard.

Go back to Settings → Akismet Anti-Spam in your WordPress dashboard, click Manually enter an API key, enter your API key, and click Connect with API key.

After successfully verifying the key, a message will appear stating about your site being protected from spam. Next, configure your desired settings and click Save Changes.

How to Monitor Akismet Anti-Spam Activity

You can monitor your Akismet Anti-Spam activity in your WordPress and Akismet account dashboards. All subscription plans allow you to see six-month, one-year, and all-time statistics. With the free subscription plan, you can track spam, ham, missed spam, false positives, and accuracy rate statistics. Paid subscription plans allow you to use diagnostics and see more advanced statistics, such as spam and ham peak periods, yearly, monthly, and daily averages.

Go to Settings → Akismet Anti-Spam in your WordPress dashboard to see basic Akismet statistics.

To see detailed statistics click Detailed Stats.

Here you can check, filter, and analyze all recent Akismet activities.

You can also find the same detailed statistics in your Akismet dashboard under Recent active sites.

And that’s it! Now, your site is protected from comment spam. Additionally, using other plugins with Akismet service integration can protect additional site areas, such as contact forms, from spammy content.

Frequently Asked Questions