Spam protection, Honeypot, Anti-Spam by CleanTalk vs Essential Form – The lightest plugin for contact forms, ultra lightweight and no spam

Trusted by over 200,000 websites and rated among the top anti-spam solutions for WordPress in 2026. No CAPTCHAs, no puzzles, and no visitor friction — just automatic spam blocking for forms, comments, registrations, subscriptions, and fake orders. Powered by a global spam detection network that includes over 1,078,000 websites and helps stop spam before it reaches your website. Install it in less than 30 seconds and start protecting your site immediately. Superpowers Stops spam comments. Stops spam registrations and logins. Stops spam contact emails. Stops fake orders eCommerce sites and online stores. Antispam for bookings. Antispam subscriptions. Stops spam surveys, polls. Stops spam in WooCommerce. Antispam for Search Form. Real-time email validation. Check if an email is real or fake. Checks and removes the existing spam comments and spam users. Blocking disposable & temporary emails. Block messages by languages, countries, networks and stop words. Public reviews It’s more than just a tool to combat spam; it’s an integral component that enhances the overall quality and performance of your website. techbusinessnews.com.au Improve Your Security WordPress Spam Protection With CleanTalk Anti-Spam The Hacker News. Compare reCAPTCHA & Akismet VS CleanTalk CleanTalk vs Google reRECAPTCHA CleanTalk vs Akismet Free trial then $12 per year CleanTalk is an anti-spam plugin which works with the premium Cloud Anti-Spam service cleantalk.org. This plugin as a service https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-org/detailed-plugin-guidelines/#6-software-as-a-service-is-permitted AntiSpam protection for comments Native spam protection for WordPress, JetPack comments and any other comment plugins. The plugin moves spam comments to SPAM folder or you can set the option to ban spam comments silently. You can also enable the option in the plugin settings to auto-delete comments from SPAM folder. Contact Form 7 Antispam Plugin extends spam protection for Contact Form 7 (CF7). It can be used with any other third-party spam filters. How to protect your Contact Form 7 using CleanTalk Anti-Spam plugin Contact Form by WPForms Antispam Plugin extends Contact Form by WPForms to provide spam protection. It filters spam submissions for each type of forms – simple contact form, marketing form, request a quote and etc. Antispam for WooCommerce & fake orders filter Anti-spam by CleanTalk filters spam registrations, spam reviews, and fake orders for WooCommerce (any eCommerce plugin as well). The plugin is fully compatible with WooCommerce 2.1+ and online stores. Many other great contact, signups and all kind of forms that supported by Anti-Spam plugin by CleanTalk Asgaros Forum Avada Forms AWeber form builder Awesome Support – WordPress HelpDesk & Support Plugin Back In Stock Notifier for WooCommerce | WooCommerce Waitlist Pro bbPress by John James Jacoby Brave Popup Builder – Popup, Optins, Lead Generation, Survey & Interactive Content Brevo – Email, SMS, Web Push, Chat, and more by Brevo Calculated Fields Form Chatway Live Chat – AI Chatbot, Customer Support, FAQ & Helpdesk Customer Service & Chat Buttons Contact Form Clean and Simple Contact Form by BestWebSoft – Advanced WP Contact Form Builder for WordPress Contact Form Plugin by Fluent Forms Ninja forms Contact Form by Supsystic Contact Form Email Constant Contact Forms Comments – wpDiscuz By AdvancedCoding Customer Reviews for WooCommerce Floating Chat Widget: Contact Chat Icons, Telegram Chat, Line Messenger, WeChat, Email, SMS, Call Button – Chaty Forminator Forms – Contact Form, Payment Form & Custom Form Builder Easy Digital Downloads – eCommerce Payments and Subscriptions made easy eForm – WordPress Form Builder Elementor – Build, Design & Manage Forms From One Place Elfsight Blocks for Elementor — 80+ Widgets Events Manager – Calendar, Bookings, Tickets, and more! By Marcus (aka @msykes) Everest Forms – Contact Form, Payment Form, Quiz, Survey & Custom Form Builder with AI FiboSearch – Ajax Search for WooCommerce Flamingo Fluentbooking.com Formidable Forms – WordPress Form Builder for Contact Forms, Calculators, Quizzes & More Form Maker by 10Web – Mobile-Friendly Drag & Drop Contact Form Builder GeoDirectory – WP Business Directory Plugin and Classified Listings Directory GiveWP – Donation Plugin and Fundraising Platform gravityforms.com – Powerful data capture fueled by Gravity Forms Gwolle Guestbook Happyforms – Form Builder for WordPress: Drag & Drop Contact Forms, Surveys, Payments & Multipurpose Forms HivePress – Business Directory, Listings & Classified Ads Plugin HubSpot All-In-One Marketing – Forms, Popups, Live Chat Hustle – Email Marketing, Lead Generation, Optins, Popups JetFormBuilder — Dynamic Blocks Form Builder Jetpack – WP Security, Backup, Speed, & Growth Jotform – Online Forms — Customizable Payment, Contact, Quiz, Survey Form Builder Kadence Blocks — Page Builder Toolkit for Gutenberg Editor Kali Forms (Free & Pro) — Contact Form & Drag-and-Drop Builder Klaviyo Kulahub Landing Page Builder – Coming Soon page, Maintenance Mode, Lead Page, WordPress Landing Pages Leaky Paywall LearnPress – WordPress LMS Plugin for Create and Sell Online Courses Lead Form Builder & Contact Form By ThemeHunk Login & Register Customizer – Popup | Slider | Inline | WooCommerce MailChimp Forms by MailMunch MailOptin – Popup, Optin Forms & Email Newsletters for Mailchimp, HubSpot, AWeber Etc. My Sticky Elements – All-in-one Sticky Floating Contact Form, Call, Click to Chat, and 50+ Social Icon Tabs MetForm – Contact Form, Survey, Quiz, & Custom Form Builder for Elementor Newsletter – Send awesome emails from WordPress by Stefano Lissa Newsletters by Tribulant Software Newsletters – MC4WP: Mailchimp for WordPress NEX-Forms – Ultimate Forms Plugin for WordPress by Basix Nextend Social Login and Register by Nextendweb Ninja forms by Kevin Stover Piotnet by piotnet.com Product Enquiry for WooCommerce (Now with AI Assistant) By WisdmLabs Quform by quform.com QuickCal by quickcal.co RegistrationMagic – Custom Registration Forms, User Registration, Payment, and User Login By Metagauss Simple Registration for WooCommerce By Astoundify Smart Forms – when you need more than just a contact form By EDGARROJAS Strong Testimonials By WP Chill SureForms – Drag & Drop Contact Form & Form Builder, Payment Form, Survey, Quiz & Calculator By Brainstorm Force User Registration & Membership – Free & Paid Memberships, Subscriptions, Content Restriction, User Profile, Custom User Registration & Login Builder By wpeverest Visual Form Builder By Matthew Muro WP Booking System – Booking Calendar By Roland Murg User Frontend: AI Powered Frontend Posting, User Directory, Profile, Membership & User Registration By weDevs WS Form LITE – Drag & Drop Contact Form Builder By Mark Westguard Wufoo Shortcode By wronganswersonly WP User Frontend, UserPro WordPress Landing Pages ZeroBounce Email Verification & Validation By zerobounce Zoho Forms – Drag & Drop Form Builder for Websites – Contact Forms, Payment Forms, Order Forms & More By Zoho Forms Protection for the forms above works as a built-in feature of Anti-Spam by CleanTalk without requiring any additional actions from the user. Check existing comments for spam. Bulk spam comments removal. Spam comment Cleaner With the help of anti-spam by CleanTalk you can inspect through existing comments to find and quickly delete spam comments at once. To use this function, go to WP Console -> Comments -> Find spam comments. Check existing users for spam. Bulk spam accounts removal. Spam users cleaner With the help of anti-spam by CleanTalk you can inspect through existing accounts to find and quickly delete spam users at once. For use this function, go to WP Console -> Users -> Check for spam. Also, you can export a list of spam users to the CSV. Private black lists for anti-spam service Automatically block comments and registrations from your private black IP/email address list. Hide «Website» field for comments This option hides the «Website» field from standard WordPress comments forms. After that spammers won’t be able to send spam links using «Website» field in the bottom of the comments form. Low false/positive rate This plugin uses multiple anti-spam tests to filter spam bots having as low false/positive rate as possible. Spam FireWall Spam FireWall allows blocking the most active spam bots before they get access to your website. It prevents spam bots from loading website pages so your web server doesn’t have to perform all scripts on these pages. Also it prevents scanning of pages of the website by spam bots. Therefore Spam FireWall significantly reduces the load on your web server. Spam FireWall also makes CleanTalk the two-step protection from spam bots. Spam FireWall is the first step and it blocks the most active spam bots. CleanTalk Anti-Spam is the second step and checks all other requests on the website in the moment of submitting comments/registers etc. How does it work? The visitor enters to your web site. HTTP request data are being checked in the nearly 5.8 million of the identified spam bot IPs. If it is an active spam bot, the bot gets a blank page, if it is a visitor then he receives a normal page. This process is completely transparent for the visitors. All the CleanTalk Spam FireWall activity is being logged in the process of filtering. Spam FireWall: Anti-Flood & Anti-Crawler Spam FireWall: Anti-Flood and Anti-Crawler options are intended for blocking unwanted bots, content parsing, shop goods prices parsing or aggressive website scanning bots. Learn more https://cleantalk.org/help/anti-flood-and-anti-crawler By default, well-known good bots — including AI crawlers such as GPTBot (ChatGPT), ClaudeBot (Claude), Google-Extended (Gemini), and Copilot — are allowed. You can choose which of these bots to block individually in your private lists. Blocking a bot will stop the corresponding AI service from accessing your content. How to protect sites from spam bots without CAPTCHA? CleanTalk Anti-Spam protects websites from spam bots without using traditional CAPTCHA, reCAPTCHA, or other visitor challenges. Instead of showing CAPTCHA puzzles, the service uses behavioral analysis, invisible JavaScript tests, and a global spam database to detect spam automatically in the background. This CAPTCHA-free anti-spam protection works for contact forms, comments, registrations, and WooCommerce checkouts without creating friction for real visitors. By replacing CAPTCHA with automated spam detection, CleanTalk helps improve usability, accessibility, and conversion rates while still blocking spam effectively. Sometimes CAPTCHA reminds us of the doodles of a two year old child. For users with vision problems CAPTCHA is an insurmountable obstacle. Users hate captcha. Captcha for users means “hate”. Unreadable CAPTCHA stops about 80% of site visitors. After 2 failed attempts to decipher CAPTCHA 95% of visitors reject further attempts. At the sight of CAPTCHA and after input errors, many visitors leave the resource. Thus, CAPTCHA helps to protect the resource spam both from bots and visitors. CAPTCHA is not a panacea from spam. Doubts concerning the Need for CAPTCHA? “Ultimately, CAPTCHAs are useless for spam because they’re designed to tell you if someone is ‘human’ or not, but not whether something is spam or not.” Matt Mullenweg Real-time email validation. Is email real or Not. It is very important to be sure that the user used his real email address. Spambots very often use fake email addresses, i.e. which addresses do not exist. CleanTalk will check email addresses for existence in real time. Non-existing email addresses also entail several other problems for website owners. You can never contact them by email, the client will never receive any notifications from you (account activation letter, password recovery, email distribution, notifications, etc.), if you use email marketing for your clients, then a large number of nonexistent emails in the mailing list may result in your IP address being added to various blacklists of email servers. Improve your email list with email validation without fake emails. Blocking disposable & temporary emails Block fake and suspicious users with disposable & temporary emails to improve email delivery. So, it also prevents malicious activity, spam bots, and internet trolls. Stops Spam in Search Form Spam bots can use your search form to make a GET request with spam text. CleanTalk Anti-Spam has the option to protect your website search form from spam bots. Each time, the search generates a new page and if there are many requests, this can create additional load. So, under some conditions, spam searches can be indexed, which affects SEO, Anti-Spam protection for website search forms repels spam bots. If your search form gets data too often the CleanTalk Anti-Spam plugin will add a pause and increase it with each new attempt to send data. It saves your web server processor time. Spam protection allows you to not forbid indexation for the crawler bots if you really need it but simultaneously you will get protection from spam bots. You will always know what users were looking for on your site. Disable comments This option disables comments on your site. You can choose one or several options: Disable comments for posts Disable comments for pages Disable comments for media When using Disables comments, existing comments will not be deleted and will remain on the pages. Email, Phones Address Encoder CleanTalk Anti-Spam offers a feature called “Encode contact data” that is designed to encode all email addresses on the website pages. Encoding email, phontes addresses increases the level of protection of contact data from being abused, parsed, getting spammed and used in spam mailing lists by bots and online criminals. To reveal the encoded email address simply click on it and it will be decoded instantly. Honeypot field The option helps to block bots. The honeypot field option adds a hidden field to the form. When spambots come to a website form, they can fill out each input field. Enable this option to make the protection stronger on these forms. Learn more about supported forms here.

Looking for a no-fuss, ultra-lightweight contact form that just works? Essential Form gives you exactly what you need — no more, no less. Use the shortcode [essential_form] wherever you want a simple contact form with the following fields: Name Email Message Agreement checkbox That’s it. No extra fluff, no performance hit. ⚡ Zero Bloat. Zero Requests. Zero Spam. Essential Form adds no HTTP requests, loads no external libraries, and runs on pure Vanilla JavaScript — only 1 kB of inline script, injected only on pages with a form. When we say it’s the lightest contact form ever made, we mean it. The entire plugin zip is just 14 kB. 🛡️ Anti-Spam, Reinvented (No Captchas, Ever) Our invisible anti-spam system blocks all automated bots — no annoying captchas, no puzzles, no headaches. Here’s how it works: Each form submission uses a unique, random token 20 random security keys are generated per site AJAX actions have unpredictable names like essential_form_fbe52b696 Robots can’t guess or simulate a valid submission The result? Only real humans get through. Bots don’t stand a chance. 🧘‍♀️ Keep It Simple Most of the time, all you need is a name, email, message, and a simple checkbox. That’s exactly what Essential Form gives you. If you need complex forms with extra fields or logic, this plugin isn’t for you — try Contact Form 7 instead. But if you want something fast, clean, and incredibly secure, Essential Form is for you. Try Essential Form today — and enjoy a faster, cleaner contact form experience. How to add a contact form on the page Add the shortcode [essential_form] Done! Features of the Contact Form Extremely lightweight – The plugin inlines about 1 kB of pure Vanilla JavaScript (even smaller when compressed) only on the page where you use the shortcode — and never above the fold. On all other pages, it doesn’t exist at all. You could say it only “exists” on a page because the form is visible — otherwise, you’d never know the plugin is there. No tool will be able to measure any meaningful resource usage caused by this plugin. The contact form includes only four fields: name, email, message, and an agreement checkbox. Nothing else. If you need more fields, this plugin isn’t for you. But if that’s all you need — you’ll love how simple and fast it is. It inherits your theme’s styles automatically. If you want custom styling, you can add your own CSS — or use a different plugin if you need more built-in design options. It includes a powerful, invisible anti-spam system. Bots won’t be able to send messages through your form. Only real humans can submit it — and if you ever get spam, it will be from a human doing it manually. No captchas, no puzzles, no user frustration. The anti-spam system works entirely behind the scenes — quietly and effectively. Shortcode Parameters You can customize the form labels and messages using these shortcode parameters: label_email label_message button_text agreement_text success_message Example usage: [essential_form label_email="Your email" label_message="Your message" button_text="Send" agreement_text="You agree with our privacy policy" success_message="Thank you for your message!"] If you don’t provide these parameters, the plugin will use the default values. How to customize the contact forms You can also customize the contact forms throught the filter hook ‘essential_form_settings’. Here an example. add_filter( 'essential_form_settings',function( $options ){ return array_merge( $options, array( 'email_from' => '[email protected]', 'email_to' => '[email protected]', 'email_subject' => sprintf( esc_html__( 'Message from %s','your-domain' ),get_bloginfo( 'name' ) ), 'label_name' => __( 'Name','your-domain' ), 'label_email' => __( 'Email','your-domain' ), 'label_message' => __( 'Message','your-domain' ), 'button_text' => __( 'Send','your-domain' ), 'agreement_text' => __( 'By submitting this form I agree with the privacy policy','your-domain' ), 'success_message' => __( 'Form submitted successfully! Thank you for your message!','your-domain' ), 'name_missing_error' => __( 'Name is a required field!','your-domain' ), 'email_missing_error' => __( 'Email is a required field!','your-domain' ), 'email_not_valid_error' => __( 'Email not valid!','your-domain' ), 'message_missing_error' => __( 'Message is a required field!','your-domain' ), 'message_too_long_error' => __( 'This message is too long! Please, write not more than 50000 characters.','your-domain' ), 'missing_agreement_error' => __( 'You have to agree with our privacy policy to submit the form.','your-domain' ) ) ); } ); If you need to do a custom action after the sending of the email, you can use the action hook ‘essential_form_after_sending’. Here an example. add_action( 'essential_form_after_sending',function( $name,$email,$message,$post_id ){ //$name is the name of the user who submitted the contant form //$message is the message which is sent through the contact form //$post_id is the ID of the page where is included the contact form //Your code here },10,4 ); If you need to customize the message that is included in the email, use the filter hook ‘essential_form_message’. Here you have an example. add_filter('essential_form_message',function( $message,$name,$email,$post_id ){ if( isset( $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] ) ){ $message .= ' IP: '.sanitize_text_field( $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] ).' '; } return $message; },10,4 ); If you need to customize the agreement text, use the filter hook ‘essential_form_agreement_text’. Here you have an example. add_filter( 'essential_form_agreement_text',function( $text ){ return 'By submitting this form I agree with the Privacy Policy '; } ); Limitations The limits of Essential Form are many, but they are what make this plugin the best if you need a ultra-lightweight contact form with just name, email, comment, and privacy agreement. If you need more, you can always install more complete but also heavier contact forms like: Contact Form 7 WPForms Forminator Formidable Forms Ninja Forms and many other amazing plugins for contact forms. How to speed up the form submission and avoid conflicts with other plugins Install and activate Freesoul Deactivate Plugins Go to Freesoul Deactivate Plugins => Plugin Manger => Actions => Essential Form Deactivate all the plugins for the actions “Getting secret key during submission” and “Form submission” By using Freesoul Deactivate Plugins to clean up all the other plugins, the form submission will be faster and without any conflict with third plugins. Demo You can see Essential Form in action on my blog post The Lightest Contact Form Plugin Ever You don’t need any demo for the backend, because there are no settings for this plugin. Just use the shortcode [essential_form] where you want to add the form, and customized as mentioned in the description. I need this plugin to do something custom If you want to integrate this plugin with other tools or workflows, I offer a custom development service for WordPress plugin integrations and feature extensions. Learn more about advanced custom functionality for WordPress.