If you have an email address, you probably receive spam.

If your email address appears on a website, you probably receive lots of spam.

Even if you’ve put a form instead of your email address on your contact page, you probably get spam through that too.

And then there are all those spam comments on your blog…

It’s not only annoying; it’s a ridiculous waste of time!

There are many tools available, both free and paid, to help combat spam sent through your website. Some are more effective than others, but I never found one I’d swear by until I tried CleanTalk.

The Spam Problem

Many of the websites I’ve created have a contact form, usually created with GravityForms. Most of the measures I’ve implemented have been relatively successful in keeping the spam to a manageable level.

But one client has a special secure form connected to her Hushmail account. All went well for several years, when suddenly her Google CAPTCHA stopped working and she started receiving a daily onslaught of spam submitted through her form.

The Spam Solution

Many of the web industry experts I know swear by CleanTalk, and since they offer a free trial, I figured we had nothing to lose.

Although there were some obstacles at first, CleanTalk support was excellent, never giving up and extending the free trial as long as necessary until they got it working correctly.

How CleanTalk Works

Okay, I confess – I don’t really know how CleanTalk manages to block spam from contact forms, registration forms, comment forms, and more.

I don’t need to understand all the technical details, but essentially, CleanTalk checks information about each submission against its cloud-based spam detection system and decides whether to allow or block it.

What I do know is this:

1. For me, it was much easier to set up than CAPTCHA.
2. It’s less intrusive to your website visitors than traditional CAPTCHA. There are no checkboxes, puzzles, or other hoops for legitimate visitors to jump through.
3. You can access the logs, so if an IP address is blocked erroneously (as far as I know, this hasn’t happened yet), you can delete it from the blocklist.
4. You can also manually add an IP address to the blocklist, if a spam message happens to get through.
5. The cost is relatively low, considering how much time it will save you.
6. It works on contact forms, comments, subscription forms, and others.

What’s unique about CleanTalk is that it’s not just for WordPress sites. They also offer spam protection for Joomla, Drupal, and other types of sites.

If you’re wasting valuable time dealing with spam coming from your website, give CleanTalk a try!

Photo by peshkova / DepositPhotos