Akismet Installation Guide

Akismet... The plugin that helps you manage spam on your website. A MUST HAVE plugin to have set up on your website, and I'm going to show you how to do that now.

The Akismet plugin will 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 find a new option in the plugin menu, Akismet Configuration. Click on that and we can get started setting it up.

Now we need to get ourselves an Akismet API Key and we can do this for free. Head over to the Akismet Website 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 right. Once you've clicked on that you'll come the signup page with a slider. Now to get Akismet for free all you have to do is drag the slider all the way down to the left.

So fill on this form and click continue and you'll see this page:

Now with whatever email address you used to register with Akismet should have an email sitting in it's inbox :)

Head over there and open it up.

Inside you'll find a username and password for the Akismet website so you can go in and change your settings if you need to in the future, but the bit we are looking for is the API key. Once you've found it, I'd recommend you copy and paste it in a word document as you can use this for multiple sites.

Now you have your code, head back over to the Akismet Configuration page in your plugin. Pop your code in the box and click save. Now you'll see a load of green bars at the moment saying Akismet has been set up correctly :)

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. So I've been told 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 his efforts.

So once you start making decent money from your site, please consider this. It's the right thing to do :)

That's the spam sorted out, but if you want to sort out your normal legitimate comments. Head over here

Now onto the next plugin...