How to Protect Emails from Spammers with WordPress Email Encoder

If you want to show your email address on your WordPress website, then you might feel tempted to simply add the link or plain text email address to your page. Unfortunately, it will most likely be copied by a spam email harvesting bot.

We’ve dealt with a lot of WordPress spam over the years, and there’s nothing more frustrating than receiving a bunch of spammy emails. That’s why we went looking for ways to show your email address in WordPress without being targeted by spambots.

In this article, we will show you how to easily protect emails from spammers with a WordPress email encoder, step by step.

Why Is Email Encoding Important?

Most website owners don’t realize that pasting their email addresses into their posts, pages, or on a contact page can put them at risk for email spam, phishing, and malware.

Spammers use email harvesting bots that automatically browse the web to collect email addresses. These email addresses are then sold to spammers all over the world.

This is why we almost always recommend creating a contact form instead of sharing an email address. That way, people and bots won’t be able to see your email address, but users can still contact you easily.

The problem is that sometimes you may really need to add an email address that users can copy or click to email.

Thankfully, there is a way to do that and protect your email address from spammers. It’s called email encoding, and it’s quite easy.

Let’s take a look at how to do that.

How to Protect Email Addresses From Spammers in WordPress

The first thing you need to do is install and activate the free Email Address Encoder plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Once you activate the plugin, Email Address Encoder automatically starts encoding email addresses in WordPress posts and pages, custom post types, widgets, comments, and excerpts.

What that means is that it converts the plain text email addresses into decimal and hexadecimal entities.

If you see the page source of your page, then you will see the encoded email addresses look like this:

This way, when an email harvesting bot visits your page source, it will not be able to see the email addresses.

However, real human users will see the plain text email addresses in their browser windows.

Email Address Encoder works out of the box, but you can configure some settings by going to Settings » Email Encoder in your WordPress dashboard.

Most of the settings here are only available if you use the premium version of Email Address Encoder. You can choose how you want the plugin to search your WordPress site for emails and the method that it will use to encode your emails.

For example, you can protect emails using HTML entities (the only option for the free plugin), CSS direction, ROT13 encoding, or polymorphous ROT47/CSS. Note that the last two options use JavaScript to work.

You can also easily encode phone numbers on your website by wrapping them in [encode] shortcode. Then, the Email Address Encoder plugin will hide the numbers from bots.

For more details, you can see our guide on how to use shortcodes in WordPress.

More Tips for Stopping Spam in WordPress

Encoding your phone number and email address on your WordPress website is just one way to prevent spam. You may also want to find ways to prevent spammy entries in your comments section and WordPress forms.

There are several things you can do, such as:

• Using a CAPTCHA on your comment forms.
• Installing an anti-spam plugin like Akismet.
• Blocking spam IP addresses.

For more details, you can see our guide on how to block contact form spam in WordPress and how to combat comment spam in WordPress.

We hope this article helped you protect email addresses in WordPress from spammers. You may also want to see our guides on how to prevent newsletter signup spam in WordPress or how to block WordPress referrer spam in Google Analytics.

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