How to hide (encode) email addresses on your WordPress website from crawlers and bots

 

Since the Anti-Spam version 5.177, we've added a new feature. Now you can encode all email addresses on your pages. Email characters will be hidden visually and addresses will be encoded, so the automatic crawlers will not be able to grab addresses. Visitors can decode addresses by mouse click. This feature helps to prevent direct spam to your email. You can enable this option in the Data Processing section here:

WordPress Dashboard → Settings → Anti-Spam by CleanTalk → Advanced settings

 

Encode contact data option

 

The plugin will encode all email addresses on your pages. 

Original view:

Original page view

 

Encoded view:

Encoded email addresses view

 

After clicking the address will be decoded:

Decoded address view

 

How to check the encryption already works

  1. Open your webpage in your browser Guest (Incognito) mode.
  2. Scroll down the page to the email address. Now you should see the email is already encrypted.

To decrypt it, just click on it. If you hover the mouse pointer over the email, you will see the “This contact was encoded by CleanTalk. Click to decode” message. It is a hint for your website visitors. Be sure to test the encryption/decryption in Guest (Incognito) mode, because if you are authorized on the site, there will be no encryption.

 

Encoded message with hint

Since version 5.184 of the Anti-Spam plugin, each email encoding is logged in your Anti-Spam Log with the status "Decoding approved".

Decoded email in Anti-Spam log

 

 

If you haven't found the answer to your question, please, contact our support team:

https://cleantalk.org/my/support/open

 

 

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