Stopping Spam With Akismet - That Marketing Dude

Akismet… The plugin that helps you manage spam on your website. A must have plugin to have on your website, and I’m going to show you how to set it up right… now!

Note: this is only needed if you use WordPress’ own commenting system. If you’re using something like Disqus like on I use for all my websites, you won’t need to install Akismet.

The Akismet plugin should already be installed on your website so you don’t have to worry about finding it and installing it, just need to set it up. So first head to your plugin section and click activate.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll see a big blue button saying “Activate your Akismet.” Click on that bad boy.

You’ll get sent to this page:

Now we need to get ourselves an Akismet API Key and we can do this for free. Head over to the Akismet Website or click the red button and we can get it. This is very easy to set up, but can easily get confusing as there is no clear free option.

So let me show you how it’s done… When you’re on the signup page you’ll see three options, Enterprise, Pro and Personal. Go and click on the Personal option on the left. Once you’ve clicked on that you’ll come the signup page with a bunch of boxes where you can pay an annual contribution to the creators.

Now to get Akismet for free just click “or use Akismet for free” underneath all the boxes.

Once you’ve filled out all the information you’ll be given your API Key. You’ll see a pop up with the API key and it’ll also be sent an email.

Now you have your code, head back to the Akismet Configuration page in your plugin. Pop your code in the box and click save. Now you’ll see a green bar saying it’s all set up.

And that’s it. Akismet is all set up. A few things to know about Akismet. Akismet allows up to roughly 80,000 comments to pass through it’s “filters” under this plan. You can use the same API key for multiple sites so long as they are small traffic sites. If you site starts getting really popular,

I’d recommend getting a separate API for your site. Also if this is the case, I’d personally look at the paid options. If your site is getting this amount of traffic you should be making a decent sum of money from it. Although this can be accessed for free I would personally start paying for it as this plugin is tremendous and the developer deserves to get some money for their efforts.

Let’s be nice here dudes and dudettes and pay them if we can afford it. If you really can’t, then write an IOU and pay them once you have the dollar to send them.