Complete Guide to WooCommerce Anti Spam

WooCommerce sites are a primary target of spambots that leave fake comments, reviews, or post links to external sites. According to an Imperva study, bots can account for up to as much as half of your total website traffic. It’s made worse by the fact that they intend to do harm to your online business. A simple and effective way to stop spambots on your store is by using WooCommerce anti spam plugins.

In this article, we’ll share our handpicked selection of the best WooCommerce anti spam plugins. We’ll also discuss the key features on offer with each plugin to help you find the right one for your online store.

But first, let’s take a look at what spam is in the context of WooCommerce and how it can damage your online store.

Why do you need WooCommerce anti spam?

Spam is a nuisance for WooCommerce site owners as it’s designed to leave nonsense data on contact forms and other pages. In some cases, they even place fake orders. This delivers poor user experience and makes your store look unprofessional.

Here’s a look at the different types of spam a typical WooCommerce store has to deal with:

• Spam orders. These are fake orders placed by automated bots or scripts. Spam orders are usually high-value orders e.g. a bot may add items worth hundreds or thousands in the shopping cart while the average price per product in your shop is around $30. Most spam orders are placed without creating a new user account and selecting the Cash on Delivery payment option which means they don’t have to provide any payment details at checkout.
• Spam registrations. These are created when bots register for new accounts on your WooCommerce store. Spam registrations tend to create dozens (sometimes even hundreds) of accounts with fake email addresses. This makes it difficult to sort real registrations from spammy ones.
• Spam reviews. Spammy reviews damage your brand’s reputation. They are created when bots leave fake reviews on product pages, making your WooCommerce store look spammy. As a result, customers lose trust in your brand.

Spamming bots can be damaging for your WooCommerce store for a number of reasons:

• Delivers poor customer experience. Spambots are designed to leave comments, reviews, and links to external sites via your contact forms and other places. This reduces the quality of your customer experience and requires a lot of cleaning up for your team.
• Your store appears to be untrustworthy. When users view fake comments and reviews on your website, they might hesitate to share their personal details and payment information with you.
• You can potentially miss out on sales. When potential customers see spammy content on your site pages, they will likely abandon your store without making a purchase. Moreover, this can lead to negative word-of-mouth for your site, leading to a significant drop in sales in the long run.

Having a robust and secure order, registration, and review system is important for your business which makes it important for store owners to protect those sections of their WooCommerce store from spam.

10 best WooCommerce anti spam plugins

Here, we’ll run the rule over some of the best WordPress anti spam plugins and highlight their standout features to help you find the right one for your specific needs.

1. Passster

Passster is a powerful WordPress security plugin that lets you secure posts, pages, and products on your website with CAPTCHAs and passwords. It’s easy-to-use and offers a variety of options to configure your online store’s security settings.

You can set up an extra layer of security on your store using Passster and prevent automated bots and other malicious software from accessing product pages. By setting up secure, strong passwords, you make it hard for spam bots to access forms and checkout pages on your site.

Key Features:

• It offers a number of ways to protect your site content namely password protection, CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, multiple passwords, and unlock via link.
• Its CAPTCHA feature detects spam orders in WooCommerce and only allows genuine users to access your site’s pages.
• Passster helps you protect your WordPress website’s content from automated bots and spammers by adding Google reCAPTCHA on your website.
• You can customize all visual elements that Passster adds to your store including color schemes, sizes, and descriptions directly from within the WordPress customizer.
• Passster comes with several action hooks and filters to help you modify your website’s content protection experience.

2. WooCommerce Anti Fraud

WooCommerce Anti Fraud is a WooCommerce anti spam plugin that helps you identify fraudulent transactions as they happen by checking the risk of each order and automatically putting unsafe or high-risk orders on hold. It does this by setting up pre-configured rules and scanning each transaction based on a set of advanced scoring rules. Moreover, you’ll be notified whenever a risky or fraudulent order is placed.

Key Features:

• You can check if a customer has made multiple purchases using the same IP address and find out if the user has used a proxy to make purchases.
• It lets you create a list of unsafe countries. This way, when a user from a high-risk or unsafe country places an order, you’ll be able to view their risk score.
• You can set up your own list of domains associated with fraudulent transactions. This enables you to detect high-risk customers using disposable or temporary email services.
• WooCommerce Anti Fraud helps you verify customers’ PayPal accounts before shipping orders by sending customizable emails that prompt them to authenticate their PayPal account.
• You’ll be able to blacklist unsafe email addresses and put orders on hold that are deemed to be fraudulent purchases.

Price: $79

3. YITH WooCommerce Anti Fraud

YITH WooCommerce Anti Fraud plugin lets you set up safety rules that help you block suspicious purchases in your online shop. You’ll be able to automatically verify orders based on several variables such as geolocation, IP address, and email address. It also lets you cancel the orders that match fraudulent parameters. Moreover, this plugin notifies you via email about high-risk transactions, prompting you to discreetly verify the potential customer.

Key Features:

• You can manually configure the risk value of all rules and set the right weights based on the importance of rules.
• YITH WooCommerce Anti Fraud plugin allows you to add unsafe domains to a block list and cancel all orders associated with those email addresses.
• it lets you know when purchase orders exceed the purchase average in your online store or the limit you’ve set.
• You’ll be notified of suspicious transactions such as when large orders are placed from the same IP within a short span of time or when a customer makes a purchase using a proxy.
• It lets you create a regional lock that blocks orders from countries deemed to be high-risk or unsafe.

Price: $69.99

4. WooCommerce Anti-Fraud

WooCommerce Anti-Fraud is a WooCommerce anti spam plugin that enables you to block fraudulent orders and blacklist high-risk customers on your online store. It helps you cancel orders from specific customers using a customized set of rules.

This plugin identifies suspicious transactions by matching the user’s IP address, state, and zip code with predefined blacklisting criteria. When a risky order is detected, the account registration or checkout will be paused and the user will be informed about why their purchase was blocked.

Key Features:

• WooCommerce Anti-Fraud plugin lets you review suspicious registration and checkout attempts based on a rule.
• You’ll be able to block specific purchase orders by email, IP address, state, and zip code.
• Along with your own block list, you can enable an external blacklist which is a list of temporary email domains in GitHub. In addition to this, you can upload bulk email addresses to block high-risk customers.
• It lets you add custom messages for blacklisted users in case a fraudulent registration or checkout attempt is detected.
• This plugin allows you to view blacklisted users and track how many times each user places an order on your online store.

Price: Free

5. IP2Location Country Blocker

IP2Location Country Blocker plugin offers protection against spam by blocking unwanted traffic from accessing your blog pages and admin area. It lets you block (1) users from specific countries and (2) people using proxies from accessing your website. As a result, you’ll be able to block spam and unwanted sign-ups by restricting unwanted users from accessing a specific page or your entire website. You can review blocked traffic data by viewing the statistical report.

In addition to this, you’ll be able to restrict attacks from bots and other crawlers while allowing search engine spiders (such as Google, Bing, and Yandex) to pass through. This plugin also offers timely support, helping you resolve issues.

Key Features:

• IP2Location Country Blocker helps you block users’ access from anonymous proxies, multiple countries, and based on IP ranges and country groupings like APAC and EU.
• It supports both IPv4 and IPv6 connections.
• You’ll be able to display a customized 403 page to blocked users.
• This plugin is SEO-friendly which means you can whitelist search engine crawlers to index your site pages.
• You’ll be notified via email if a user tries to access your admin area.

Price: Free

6. Honeypot for Contact Form 7

Honeypot for Contact Form 7 is an effective WordPress anti spam plugin that enables you to stop spam in its tracks with a simple honeypot. This way, you can prevent bots from spamming your forms without implementing a CAPTCHA feature. 

It works by fooling bots into entering information in hidden form fields. These fields clearly notify the human user to leave them empty. This way, a honeypot detects the bots that blindly fill in such fields which leads to the form being invalidated.

Key Features:

• Honeypot for Contact Form 7 helps you instantly stop all the spam while allowing legitimate inquiries to pass through.
• The honeypot module offers a simple and clutter-free way to verify contact forms, however, you can also use more advanced anti spam techniques as well.
• You can implement CAPTCHA forms, math questions, and other measures to filter spam contact forms from users.
• You’ll be able to use three different filters to customize the honeypot field HTML output.
• You can use Honeypot to seamlessly integrate a trap for spambots into your Contact Form 7 forms in a few clicks.

Price: Free

7. NS8

NS8 is a complete fraud prevention tool that helps you protect your transactions from deceptive and high-risk users. It uses advanced data analytics and real-time scoring to identify and block threats, enabling you to increase your acceptance rate without worry. This way, you can focus on core business activities without denying legitimate customers access to your products and services.

It offers you security tools that can help you minimize the risk of fraudulent transactions. You’ll be able to set customized order rules that match your unique business requirements and keep customers engaged in the buying process.

Key Features:

• With NS8, you get risk scores for transactions from inside WooCommerce’s default order queue. It generates warning icons for high-risk orders that display fraud markers and are considered suspicious.
• You can secure your website from malware by monitoring Google’s safe browsing list for your domain and get notified through email or SMS if potential malware is detected.
• It enables you to separate deceptive users from authentic ones by analyzing their actions, helping you approve more legitimate orders.
• You’ll be able to monitor your site’s performance from a global perspective and get notified when an issue needs your attention.
• NS8 helps you save ad revenue by detecting and blocking fraudulent users from getting tagged for remarketing.

Price: $29.95 per month.

8. Akismet Anti-Spam

Akismet Anti-Spam is a WordPress anti spam plugin that enables you to identify and block spam in an effective way. It offers a simple and reliable way to check your contact form queries and comments against its global database of spam, preventing your website from publishing inappropriate or malicious content.

In addition to this, you’ll be able to review the comment spam detected by Akismet on your website’s Comments admin page and quickly approve genuine comments. 

Key Features:

• It lets you automatically check all comments and discard the ones that appear to be spam.
• Akismet assigns a status history to each comment. This way, you can quickly differentiate which comments were marked as spam or legitimate by Akismet and the ones which were marked as spam or approved by a moderator.
• You’ll be able to automatically discard the worst spam, helping you save disk space and improve site performance.
• As a moderator, you can view the number of cleared comments for each user.
• It displays URLs in the comment body to reveal misleading and hidden links.

Price: Free

9. Honeypot WooCommerce – WordPress AntiSpam

If you run an online store, you need a simple and effective tool to protect your store from bots that flood your site by leaving fake comments, reviews, or post links to external sites. Honeypot WooCommerce – WooCommerce AntiSpam is a WordPress anti spam plugin that enables honeypot input fields as hidden within the WooCommerce registration and login form. This way, you’re able to check and block fake orders in your online store.

It works by creating a trap that involves adding a hidden field to your form. Human users will be able to see and ignore the hidden field and leave it empty. However, spambots will fill out every field, revealing their identity. As a result, the plugin will block the spam submissions.

Key Features:

• This plugin enables a honeypot in a number of places on your website including the WooCommerce login form, WooCommerce registration form, comments box of the post, WordPress registration form, and WordPress login form.
• It will ignore search engine crawlers and only detect and stop spambots.
• Honeypot WooCommerce – WordPress AntiSpam helps you quickly detect and discard unwanted information, helping optimize your site’s performance.

Price: Free

10. Titan Anti-spam & Security

Titan Anti-spam & Security is an easy-to-use WordPress anti spam plugin that protects your website from spammers and other online bots. Along with anti spam protection, it gives you access to several website security tools including firewall, site accessibility checking, malware scanner, and threats and security audits for WordPress websites.

With Titan Anti-spam & Security plugin, when a user posts a comment on your site, it is displayed right away. A background check will initiate to detect whether the comment is legitimate or spam. If it’s identified as spam, Titan will immediately hide it from view.

Key Features:

• Its anti spam filter helps you check your website’s comments through its global spam database, preventing your site from publishing inappropriate or malicious content.
• Titan Anti-spam comes with powerful algorithms to offer accurate and reliable protection against spambots.
• You can access complete logs of all the processed requests and quickly view the spam filters results.
• Blocks spammers (both humans and automated bots) without using CAPTCHA checks.
• It releases regular updates to the anti-spam module.

Price: Free

Basic general practices for WooCommerce anti spam

Here are some of the ways you can implement spam protection on your WooCommerce site and prevent spambots and other malicious software from accessing your store’s pages and forms.

Configure WooCommerce anti spam settings

Start by properly configuring the basic anti spam settings on your WooCommerce site. Switch off the Anyone can register option by going to Settings > General. Keep in mind that some WooCommerce themes might cause a conflict with this option.

Next, navigate to Settings > Discussions to change the following WordPress comments and moderation settings.

Enable the Comment author must have a previously approved comment setting under the Before a comment appears section to prevent spammy comments. This way, once you approve comments from a user, they’ll be automatically added to a whitelist of users.

Make sure that you disable the Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) on new posts. This will block any pingback spam from reaching your website.

Change the register page URL

As we mentioned earlier, WooCommerce is a common target for spambots and other malicious software. A simple way to block spam is by changing the URL of the registration page or by creating a different register page.

You can create a new registration page by simply adding the [woocommerce_my_acount] shortcode to it. Alternatively, you’ll be able to modify the URL of the registration page by going to the Register page and changing it from yoursite.com/register to something like yoursite.com/user-registration.

Ask customers to verify their email at registration

An effective way to prevent spam on your WooCommerce site is by using a plugin like User Email Verification for WooCommerce that prompts the user to confirm their registration by clicking on a link sent directly to their inbox. And if a user hasn’t activated their account, you’ll be able to manually review their status and approve them. This method offers powerful protection against spammers as they won’t be able to make it past the manual approval stage.

Set up new user approval

You can use a security plugin like Profile Press to implement manual approval of new users on your WooCommerce site. It lets you manually verify new users through the dashboard or directly from the user’s email. Profile Press is an ideal tool for small businesses that want more control over users that create an account on their website.

Protect your WooCommerce store from spam

With the right WooCommerce anti spam plugins, you can easily protect your e-commerce store from spammy content and fake orders. They’re designed to prevent spambots and other malicious software from exploiting your website.