While using Elementor Contact Form, always be sure to use the most effective Anti-Spam plugin. Read the guide below and learn how to protect your Elementor Contact Form from spam in 5 minutes.
Once CleanTalk Anti-Spam plugin is installed it starts to protect all of the existing forms on your WordPress website. It may not only be Elementor Contact Form but many others.
To install the Anti-Spam plugin, go to your WordPress admin panel → Plugins → Add New.
Then enter «СleanTalk» in the search box and click the Install button for «Spam protection, Anti-Spam, FireWall by CleanTalk».
After installing the plugin, click the «Activate» button.
After it is done go to the plugin settings and click the «Get Access Key Automatically» button. Then just click the «Save Settings» button.
That’s it! From now you How to completely protect your Elementor Contact Form from spam.
Check the result to save your Elementor Contact Form from spam
You can test the work of Anti-Spam protection for your Elementor Contact Form by using a test email s @ cleantalk.org (without spaces). First, open the form in an Incognito browser tab.
Fill in all the required form fields and send a form. After submitting the form, you will see a block message about the block on the form submission.
If you have any questions, add a comment and we will be happy to help you.
Create your CleanTalk account – Register now and protect your Elementor Contact Form from spam in 5 minutes
Update
The protection works only for website visitors, not for website admins. Be sure to test the form protection using Incognito mode.
Additional features
CleanTalk protects all forms at once: comments, registrations, feedbacks, contacts, reviews.
Installation takes about 1-2 minutes.
Smart 99% protection against spambots.
Always online – 24/7 technical support.
Logs, SpamFireWall, personal lists, country filters, stop-words, and many others.
Receiving only valid email addresses on the contact form is very important for effective communication with customers. Incorrect or invalid addresses can result in lost leads and skewed marketing campaign performance statistics. CleanTalk Anti-Spam has the ability to check email addresses for their existence, which helps avoid sending emails to invalid addresses and ensures accurate and reliable contact information. This saves time and resources when processing data, and improves the overall effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
Discover the complete list of CleanTalk Anti-Spam plugin features here.
This article is about how the data of the CleanTalk Blacklists Database is being used by our clients in their businesses.
Brief description of what the CleanTalk Blacklists Database is The CleanTalk Anti-Spam and Security services get data of malicious actions that are being performed on the websites of our clients. IP and email addresses of the suspicious visitors are being added to the CleanTalk Blacklists Database. The CleanTalk Blacklists Database is being updated in real time, outdated addresses (that weren’t used for attacks for a certain period of time) are being deleted from the Database while new addresses with malicious activity spotted on several websites at once are being added to the Database.
What are Possible Ways of Using the CleanTalk Blacklists Database of Spam IP and Email Addresses
Based on the examples of our clients we want to demonstrate the ways of how they use our data of spam active addresses.
Online marketing Owners of online businesses send their marketing offers and deals by launching their mailing campaigns. They collect their leads from their website forms after receiving completed checkouts or after getting new signups. Spammers on the other hand use website forms to send spam and they can use either lists of fake email addresses or real email addresses of random people.
In both cases when our clients launch their marketing campaigns using these unreliable email addresses nobody gets anything good. Quantity of emails sent to fake addresses or to unaware people will increase, random people most likely mark such emails as spam or report them. Thus, there are risks for the online email campaigns to get a lot of spam reports and as a result the webservers might be blacklisted, percentage of successfully delivered emails might be lower than expected, there might be problems in delivering emails to legitimate users.
To avoid this the mailing lists have to be checked for spam and refined from fake and spam addresses. The outcome of the mailing campaign will be much better and more precise.
Website builders Website builders such as WIX.com use our data of spam active addresses for strengthening their defense from spam and malicious activity on websites of their clients. If webservers get an online request from an address that is in the CleanTalk Database then this is a good reason for verification to be made stricter.
Enterprise networks To protect enterprise networks from unauthorized access and hacking. Protection for such networks usually consists of several layers of authentication and other security tools. The CleanTalk Blacklists Database of Spam IP and Email Addresses is one of the tools that helps making protection more reliable.
Protection for mobile applications The CleanTalk Blacklists Database of Spam IP and Email Addresses is also being used for protection from spam signups and spam registrations in mobile applications.
Protection for API, web applications In this case anti-spam checks are being performed for the addresses that call the API and if the address is blacklisted in the Database then it’s a good cause to pay a closer attention to it and take necessary measures. The most common ways of using our CleanTalk Blacklists Database of Spam IP and Email Addresses were mentioned in this article to help reinforce the security level of any online business. It’s possible to get access to the CleanTalk Blacklists Database with our APIs or by downloading it in files.
Universal Anti-Spam plugin can be installed on any custom websites, CMS and Frameworks. If you don’t have programming experience to add our API on a website it will be a better way to protect your website from spam with CleanTalk. Invisible to the visitors, spam protection has a positive effect on the loyalty of the site’s audience.
Installation guide
1. Make backup copies of your website files and database.
2. Download and unzip the “cleantalk” folder into your websites’ ROOT folder.
3. Proceed to address (your_website_name/cleantalk/install.php):
4. Enter your Access key and click the button “Install” to continue with the installation or enter your e-mail to register a CleanTalk profile and continue with the installation.
Also, you can register a CleanTalk profile manually by simply clicking the button “Don’t have an account? Create here!“.
Universal Anti-Spam plugin will write protection code to index.php file by default. If your contact or registration forms are located in different files/scripts, list them in the “Advanced configuration” section separated by commas. Also, you can set an additional password to the plugin settings.
At the end of the successful installation, you will see this message
5. You can test any form on your website by using special e-mail st********@ex*****.com. Every submits with this email will be blocked. There is an example of site registration interface on the image.
How to Add Website to Cleantalk Anti-Spam Dashboard
Notice: To enter the plugin settings go to (your_website_name/cleantalk/settings.php). Here you can manage the plugin options, see statistics and uninstall the plugin.
Please go to your Dashboard to see your anti-spam status, add new websites or manage existing ones!
Part 2: Adding some settings to CS-Cart to protect your CS-Cart website from spam
Step 1: Create a block with html content.
And after that go to its Content tab and enable the html adding mode.
The value of the variable Q6b4cecdsec6dc894Fa55387bde069cbee18705a0a25e826c30a11774da0b262 needs to be changed and is equal to SHA256 (your API key).
Step 2: Go to Layouts and add this block to the layout of your main page to make it display all over the website.
That’s it! Now you know how to protect your CS-Cart website from spam and from now your site is safe.
Read more about all CleanTalk anti-spam features. Read the following guide and learn how to protect your CS-Cart website from spam using Universal Anti-Spam plugin.
December 2021 update:
We have changed the way frontend hash is generated:
MD5 algorithm is replaced by more progressive SHA256 because of collisions, that were making brute-force easier. Now it’s much more safe. This is relevant for all users of the plugin.
From now hash also contains Salt (a unique set of characters generated at the installation stage) in order to exclude brute-forcing of an access key.
Also in the admin panel for CS-CART users there is a snippet that must be inserted into the pages, i.e. no need to go somewhere yourself – everything is at hand in a box. I am attaching a picture.
Also backward compatibility works here: users who have installed the snippet on MD5 don’t need to redo something.
Instead of these 3 parameters, we added the “spam_frequency_24h” parameter, which shows the number of spam requests from the address over the past 24 hours.
If you get spam through your comments forms you can always use our Anti-Spam plugin for complete spam protection. But if you decided to disable all WordPress Comments on your website we also have a simple decision for you.
Follow our guide to disable all the Comments fields you don’t need in less than 5 minutes.
How to install CleanTalk Anti-Spam plugin
To install the Anti-Spam plugin, go to your WordPress admin panel → Plugins → Add New.
Then enter «СleanTalk» in the search box and click the Install button for «Spam protection, Anti-Spam, FireWall by CleanTalk».
After installing the plugin, click the «Activate» button.
After it is done go to the plugin settings and click the «Get Access Key Automatically» button. Then just click the «Save Changes» button.
Disable all WordPress Comments in 3 steps
Step 1: Go to Plugins → Installed Plugins.
Then go to Settings link next to CleanTalk Anti-Spam plugin.
Step 2: Click on «Advanced settings» button at the bottom of the screen. More setting will appear.
Then find Disable all comments in Comments and Messanges section.
Step 3: Choose wherever you want to disable comments (1) and then press the Save Changes button (2).
Done! It really is that simple.
If you have any questions, add a comment and we will be happy to help you.
One of the most important things about protecting your website from hackers is understanding that one-time setting the security settings for your site is not enough. Taking care of your website protection is a permanent process like advertising or helping your clients with their issues.
Security tools for your website become stronger and more progressive every day but so do hacking technologies. The most simple way to find out if your site is in danger is to proceed through a complete WordPress security audit and figure out if your security measures are up-to-date.
If you do not go through a regular WordPress security audit every 3 months this may cause a breach in site security and your business can get a lot of damage.
But this risk can be avoided – just check if your security measures are up-to-date. In this instruction we will describe how to do a complete WordPress security audit to fully protect your website from hackers using standard security tools.
Sometimes the problem of security issues may be caused by missing security patch or update, some plugin vulnerability or a flaw in WordPress core that may result into a hack. Actually, only about 36% of users run up-to-date WordPress versions.
What is a WordPress Security Audit?
A WordPress security audit is a regular procedure that will inspect your website for different security vulnerabilities like weak admin passwords and outdated plugins. This audit also offers some steps for fixing these potential dangers.
Some website owners know how to perform a WordPress security audit but see it only as a one-time thing – it is a very popular mistake that may result in a threat to your site’s security. So it is highly recommended to perform the security audit of your WordPress site regularly to avoid hacker attacks and keep your website safe.
Without regular security audits performed your website becomes much more vulnerable to hacker attacks. You can use special WordPress plugins to automatically analyze and find security breaches for you. But vost security audits are performed manually by following 8 steps. Only several steps to find out how to perform WordPress security audit and fully protect your website from any attacks.
Why do you need a WordPress Security Audit?
Actually there is no magic about the main reasons to perform a WordPress security audit. In case you are a website owner and you don’t look after it’s security – no surprise it is vulnerable and can be hacked. It leads us to an easy conclusion that a security audit is necessary to find security breaches and vulnerabilities in your site until it becomes a problem. Without this procedure hackers may detect this vulnerabilities before your and so they can:
Hack your website;
Sell your and your client’s data via dark web;
Inject spam to your WordPress site pages so that will lead the website to search engine blacklist;
Steal your credit card info from your WordPress site that may result lawsuits and hefty fines against you;
Use your website to infect other users;
Many other bad things.
How to perform a complete WordPress security audit
1. Estimate the efficiency of your Security plugin
It all starts with your website’s security plugin. In case you still don’t use one, be sure to connect it and activate on your site as soon as possible. Security plugin protects all the WordPress sites from bots and hackers. Different security plugins offer various options to protect your site and not all of them guarantee a safe work for your website. When you choose a plugin during WordPress Security Audit, be sure it includes the following features:
Brute-force Protection Adds a delay of a few seconds for any failed attempt to login to the WordPress back-end. It makes your website security tougher and doesn’t waste the server’s resources on these IPs.
Daily Security Report Every day the plugin sends a Security report to your email. The report provides data on the number of incorrect password entries and the IP addresses from which they tried to sign in.
Login Attempts and Password Searching Log Security log keeps online a log of attempts to log in. Security log includes IP / Country / data / time, username and action result, was authorization successful or failed.
User actions log Keeps track of actions in the WP Dashboard to let you know what is happening on your site. With the Security Audit Log is very easy to see user activity in order to understand what changes have been done and who made them. Security Audit Log shows who logged in and when and how much time they spent on each page.
Security FireWall This option may significantly reduce the risk of hacking and reduces the load on your web server. Always use personal BlackList to block IP addresses with suspicious activity to enhance WordPress security. It also allows you to block access to your website by HTTP/HTTPS for individual IP addresses, IP networks, and e-mails.
Compatibility It should be compatible with the most popular VPN services and search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, MSN, Yandex and etc.
Malware scan Scans WordPress files for hacked files or hacker code. Every day Malware Scanner will launch scanning automatically for files that have been changed from the last scanning or found new files. The scanner works in the background and doesn’t affect performance. All detailed results must be sent to your Security Dashboard so you are able to investigate them and see if those were legitimate changes or some bad code was injected. If any files were changed in your WordPress system you will be able to delete them or restore the original WordPress files.
We recommend using CleanTalk as it covers all these features. It has one of the best malware scanners that can detect any kind of malware. And more of that, you can clean up any malware infection in under a few minutes!
2. Give a test to the WordPress backup solution
In case something goes wrong with your website, having a backup may be very useful. You may get your site back to work with no problem. Any fail in a backup process may be critical and may cause a lot of trouble restoring your website.
That is the main reason you need to give a regular test for your site backup solution. Even if you use host backup it may not always include any test options.
So we recommend some actions to test your backup:
Go to your WordPress plugins page and install BlogVault backup plugin. This plugin automatically initializes a complete backup procedure for your site. If it is the first backup it may take a bit more time as it will copy the whole site to it’s servers. After that every backup will copy only files that were changed from the previous backup process.
After completing the backup, the option “Test Restore” will appear in the BlogVault dashboard.
After it is done the system will notify you about a successful restore.
3. Analyze your administrator setup
WordPress has a smart system of user access options to let them collaborate and work together to be more efficient themselves and WordPress maintenance and development. Though not all WordPress users need to have complete access to your website. For example, a person who writes news, articles, and other materials only needs access to writing and publishing content. They don’t need to have access to other website options like managing plugins and changing WordPress themes.
In order to avoid giving complete access to every website user WordPress has 6 different user roles that can be assigned to them:
Super Admin
Administrator
Editor
Author
Contributor
Subscriber
Each role has different levels of permissions for your website.
While providing your WordPress Security Audit one of the first things you should do is to check all of the users who are added to your WordPress.
Be sure to recognize all of the users on your dashboard. If you don’t recognize any of them – you should immediately delete this user because it may be created by hackers.
Check the number of users who have admin access to your site.
Decide how many of them really need that access level.
Change roles for users and lower permissions for those who doesn’t need that access level.
After that ensure that none of your website administrators uses the “admin” username. This is the most popular username for all of the administrators. Hackers know about this and may obviously try to use it to get access to your website.
If you decide to change the admin name you have to create another user account for that person. After that, you have to grant all the content access to this new user. And finally, just delete the old admin account.
Another important thing for you to protect your admin setup from hackers is hiding your admin’s username. If you leave settings unchanged it may cause some troubles.
All of the hackers know that the only thing that should be done to retrieve your most likely admin username is to add ?author=1 at the end of your URL. It is how easily hackers can brute force a website’s admin panel after they know the admin’s username.
The easiest way to avoid it is to hide all usernames with code in functions.php file:
add_action(‘template_redirect’, ‘bwp_template_redirect’);
function bwp_template_redirect()
{
if (is_author())
{
wp_redirect( home_url() ); exit;
}
}
If you use the CleanTalk Security plugin it already has a special field that automatically hides all of the usernames on your site.
This may seem a very easy step but it also makes a hacker’s work more difficult.
4. Remove unused plugins installed and active
Different WordPress plugins are one of the most vulnerable places on your website. It may be the main reason for you site to be hacked.
WordPress plugins are always created, maintained, and updated by their developers. But like any other software, these plugins may have vulnerabilities. So developers always fix these vulnerabilities and release updates. When you download this update it removes vulnerability from your website.
But in case you skip or delay downloading the newest update your site may remain vulnerable.
Do you still use these plugins? While performing a complete WordPress Security Audit check the list of plugins that are installed in your WordPress. In case you already don’t use them, they still have access to your website. So, at first, delete the plugins that you don’t use. It should reduce the chance of being hacked using one of them.
Do you recognize all of the plugins? In case you and your colleagues do not recognize some of your plugins it would be better to delete them. It is because when hackers break into your site they may install their own plugins that can cause even more damage as they contain backdoors which actually is a secret access to your website.
Do you have any nulled version or pirated plugins? If yes, then you should delete them at once. Hackers often use pirated software to spread their malware. Any quantity of such malware is contained in these plugins and it may infect your website at the moment you install the plugin.
From the moment you left only the plugins you use, be sure to update them right after developers release updates.
5. Remove any additional themes for WordPress that are Installed
A complete WordPress Security Audit is also about themes. It is no surprise that all the WordPress site owners install different themes in order to find the ones that they like. Favorite themes are used but others are often But most of these users don’t know that just like plugins, themes may contain different vulnerabilities.
Our recommendation is to delete all the themes except the one you already use. Also, be sure you use the most up-to-date version available of your active theme.
6. Estimate the provider of your hosting and current tariff
Nowadays you can create a website without serious money investment. Shared hosting allows you cheaper plans for small WordPress sites. Also hosting is an important part of a proper WordPress Security Audit.
But everything has its pros and cons. Shared hosting means that you share a server with other users and sites. It is out of your vision what happens with other websites on your hosting. If someone other’s website was hacked it may consume a large amount of server’s resources. It may obviously slow down your website and lower its performance.
That is also a slight chance of a malware infection will spread to different websites on the same hosting. So if you can afford to switch to a dedicated server – it will be our recommendation to do so – to evaluate your hosting plan. In case some hosting doesn’t fit you well, you may look through a better one, comparing some of them that cost your attention.
7. Inspect any users with FTP access granted to your site
As you already know FTP is a File Transfer Protocol. It provides your computer to your site on the server. Using FTP you may access all the website folders and files and change them.
As FTP has almost full control of your website you should be very careful and grand that kind of access to only users that you trust the most and only in case they really need that access.
In order to increase the protection of your website we strongly recommend you reset FTP passwords if necessary and check the list of your FTP users. You can make it if you go to your hosting account → cPanel → FTP accounts.
Check all the users in this list and just delete the ones you already do not need.
8. Check out WordPress secure Hardening measures
While providing a WordPress Security Audit there are several recommendations for your WordPress site to become more secure. What are these steps:
Switch off file editor for themes and plugins
Switch off installation of different plugins
Reset salts and keys on your WordPress website
Use stronger password
Set a limit of login attempts available
Enable two-factor authentication
Also we strongly recommend giving these steps a regular test. For example, if you use a two-step authentification or login attempts limit – be sure to use the actual up-to-date plugin. Or if it is not so, just switch to another solution that is updated more often.
Some of these hardening steps need some skill for the appliance. Or in case you use the CleanTalk Security plugin most of these features are enabled in a few seconds.
Conclusion
After reading this article you know how to perform a WordPress Security Audit by yourself. Just be sure to deal with all of these 8 steps and you will prevent most of the bad things that could happen with your website.
For example, if you will regularly check your site backup system and will be sure that it works well, you will avoid a lot of troubles in case of a security breach or something more serious happens to your website.
The process of Security audit involves a lot of steps and takes some skill and time. But some of the most important processes are just about keeping all the components of your website up-to-date, being sure that your login page is well-protected, and using very strong passwords.
So in the cost of a few hours spent for this WordPress Security Audit, you can avoid a lot of security issues and guarantee the best protection for your website.
After you created your contact form using Gravity Forms you actually may get spam. CleanTalk Anti-Spam plugin protects your Gravity contact forms from spam.
Once CleanTalk Anti-Spam plugin is installed it starts to protect all of the existing forms on your WordPress website. It may not only be Gravity contact forms but many others.
How to install CleanTalk Anti-Spam plugin
To install the Anti-Spam plugin, go to your WordPress admin panel → Plugins → Add New.
Then enter «СleanTalk» in the search box and click the Install button for «Spam protection, Anti-Spam, FireWall by CleanTalk».
After installing the plugin, click the «Activate» button.
After it is done go to the plugin settings, click the «Get Access Key Automatically» button. Then click the «Save Settings» button.
That’s it! From now your WordPress website and Gravity forms are protected from spam.
How to check that CleanTalk already protects your Gravity contact forms from spam
You can test the work of Anti-Spam protection for your Gravity contact form by using a test email s @ cleantalk.org (without spaces). First, open the form in an Incognito browser tab. Fill in all the required form fields and send a form. After submitting the form, you will see a block message about the block on the form submission.
If you have any questions, add a comment and we will be happy to help you.
Create your Cleantalk account – Register now and enjoy while CleanTalk Anti-Spam plugin protects your Gravity contact forms from spam.
Update
The protection works only for website visitors, not for website admins. Be sure to test the form protection using Incognito mode.
Additional features
CleanTalk protects all forms at once: comments, registrations, feedbacks, contacts, reviews.
Installation takes about 1-2 minutes.
Smart 100% protection against spambots.
Always online – 24/7 technical support.
Logs, personal lists, country filters, stop-words and many another.
Our mission is to protect your website from spam. In order to do so we need to firstly identificate visitor’s IP address. But detecting IP address sometimes may go wrong because it may be substituted by some bots. So we decided to exclude the probability of false triggering and here comes the CleanTalk Pixel that improves your website spam protection.
What is CleanTalk Pixel and how does it improve your site spam protection
It is an «invisible» 1×1px image that Anti-Spam plugin integrates to your WordPress website. And when someone visits your website the Pixel is triggered and reports this visit and some other data including true IP address.
This Pixel is not located on some server but is created in HTML every time you load your website page. This exactly helps our system to get the most true IP address and not be confused by CDN or plugins caching site requests. And that’s exactly how CleanTalk Pixel improves your website spam protection.
How to connect Pixel to your website
Step 1: Go to Plugins → Installed Plugins.
Then go to Settings link next to CleanTalk Anti-Spam plugin.
Step 2: Click on «Advanced settings» button at the bottom of the screen. More setting will appear.
Then find Add a CleanTalk Pixel… field in Data Processing section.
Step 3: Choose, how exactly Pixel will act:
Via direct output – insert Pixel code into HTML from the backend.
Via Javascript – insert Pixel code into HTML from the frontend.
Auto – insert Pixel code into HTML from the backend if pixel detects a caching plugin (Recommended).
Off – Pixel if disabled.
After that just press the Save Changes button.
Done! It really is that simple.
If you have any questions, add a comment and we will be happy to help you. Create your Cleantalk account – Register now
You can see a complete list of CleanTalk Anti-Spam plugin features here.
In case your website is connected to CleanTalk it uses a special Access key to exchange information. We have improved its functionality to guarantee you the safest user experience.
Step 1: Add your website to dashboard using the button below. If your site is already connected to CleanTalk pass to Step 3.
Step 2: Input your website URL in “Site URL” field.
Step 3: Click on “Settings” button under your website name.
Step 4: Go to “Change the Access key”.
Step 5: Click on “Generate key” to create new safe Access key.
Step 6: Then Apply the key by pressing the button below.
Step 7: And just close the window after you are finished.
Well done! Your new Access key is successfully generated and applied to your website. From now it will be active and if needed, you may change it again to guarantee its safety.
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