There is one plugin (ok there are a few) that I install on every WordPress website that I create. I know I haven’t talked much about plugins but this one just saved me a ton of time today so I wanted to just give it a shout-out and point you in that direction in case you have your site setup and you are having problems with too many comments. This plugin is called Akismet.
Now real quick for those who don’t know what I’m talking about, a plugin is a set of code that you can install into WordPress which enables new functionality on your website. It could be something as simple as adding website tracking codes so you know how many visitors you are getting, or something more complicated like checking every comment that comes on your website to see if it is “Spam”.
According to it’s WordPress download page this is what Akismet does:
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.
Now you might be wondering why that would be important. Well I can give you an example. Today, this site got hit with comment spam. In the last day or so my website was hit with approximately 60 spam comments. Now if I didn’t have Akismet checking each comment then this post (by the time you are reading it) and many others would have random comments that have nothing to do with the site and links to spam sites. Luckily though with this free tool I was able to keep the site clean from that garbage without having to go through each comment.
Akismet does require an API key which you can get here. Keys are free for personal blogs, with paid subscriptions available for businesses and commercial sites.
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