Speed up your WordPress website with spam comment cleansing

If you own a WordPress website, you’ve likely received annoying spam comments at least once. It is not uncommon for some sites to receive hundreds or even thousands of comments every week.

As a website owner, it’s great to see growth in incoming traffic, but the downside is that when your site gains traction, the number of spam comments it receives also increases. Most of the spam comments come from automated spam bots, and if you don’t moderate them, you’ll find it can reduce your SEO score and significantly slow down your site.

How do spam bots find my website?

As millions of people use WordPress, millions of websites have similar HTML output for comment forms. This makes it easier for bots to find open comment forms on blog posts and post spam comments.

To find targets, a spammer crawls the internet for relevant keyword searches regularly found on WordPress sites, e.g., “powered by WordPress” or “leave a reply. “ In this case, most results will be for pages with open comment forms on WordPress sites.

What’s the purpose of spam commenting?

Comment spam exists for one reason, and one reason only: the link.

The business model of spam comments is to get people to click on their links. It’s purely a numbers game because the more blogs they post on, the more likely they will get a click. A good comment spammer will send millions of spam comments to try and gain clicks, and they hope your blog may be a prime opportunity.

Does it matter if I allow spam commenting on my blog?

If you don’t moderate comments (i.e., you allow all comments to be directly published without approval), you’ll soon find your posts and pages filled with irrelevant content. This will ultimately reduce your SEO score, as search engines will be unsure what your website is about and assume your blog is spammy. After all, you are the company you keep.

You’ll also risk being seen as an easy target, leading to even more spam. Plus, giving spammers equal presence in your comment section can annoy your customers and followers.

How can I avoid spam comments?

The best way to stop spam comments is to configure your settings so that you can approve each comment manually. Comments can also be marked as spam automatically if they contain any banned words you specify in your denylist.

Moderating comments can be time-consuming, but it will prevent your site’s SEO from being negatively impacted.

What happens if I don’t delete the comments?

You may be tempted to leave a backlog of unapproved comments due to the time and effort it takes to review and approve them; however, this can significantly reduce the size of your WordPress database if it has a lot of spam comments.

If your WordPress database keeps getting filled with spam comments that are not actioned, it weighs down your database, making your website sluggish. To avoid slowing down your page loading times, keep up with the comments accumulated in the backend.

At WP Tech Support, we offer a spam comment cleansing service as part of our ongoing WordPress maintenance and support packages. We delete any spam comments on your WordPress blog, prevent future spam from being posted, and continuously monitor the comments you receive. This leaves you to focus on the day-to-day running of your business without being bogged down with administration. Look at our great value plans to find the one best suited to your business. You can also check out our WordPress Speed Optimization Service.