Recently I took on a new client with an existing website, a client that was looking for monthly maintenance for their WordPress site.
The owner had been doing their own website maintenance, but wanted to focus more on their business and decided it made more sense to hire a third-party company.
After we agreed I would manage their website maintenance, my client told me they were frustrated with the amount of spam email they received from their website.
The website is the only location where we use that email address. We’re getting dozens of spam messages every week from the contact page.
Can you figure out what’s going on, Deborah?
We tired of getting all those messages.
I had reviewed their contact page and knew I had a solution.
Read on to learn how I reduced the amount of spam messages my new client receives.
Email Address Encoder Plugin
If you add plain text email addresses or mailto: links to your website pages, you need to protect your email address.
Otherwise, hackers and bots will scrape your website for email addresses and sell your addresses to spammers.
With the Email Address Encoder plugin, you can encode the email address so it’s protected from email-harvesting robots.
The plugin is free and offers a premium version with built-in support for Advanced Custom Fields, WooCommerce, and others.
Why I Like It
In the past, I’ve used multiple email address encoding tools, but Email Address Encoder is one of the easiest to use.
It’s straightforward and encodes email addresses into decimal and hexadecimal entities.
Here are a few more reasons I like Email Address Encoder:
- Constantly maintained and updated
- Works on pages, posts, comments, excerpts, text widgets
- Handy plugin guide for using the shortcode and filtering more content
- Translated into eight languages
- Quick replies from the developer in the support forum
How the Plugin Works
Once you’ve installed and activated the Email Address Encoder plugin, you’ll find a new option added to your Settings.
I didn’t make any changes to the plugin default settings, there’s only one option for the free version of the plugin. If you have the premium version, there are more options you can configure.
Here’s the screenshot of the Email Address Encoder settings options:
Summary
My client replied back to me the week after I added Email Address Encoder plugin to their website to tell me they only received two spam messages that week. They were happy, hurrah!
Plain email addresses or mailto: links on your website pages are candy to email-harvesting robots.
The Email Address Encoder plugin makes it easy to protect email addresses so you don’t have to worry as much about spam messages.
Have you used the plugin on your WordPress sites? Or do you use another tool to protect email addresses? Share your thoughts in the comments
