CleanTalk Anti-Spam & Site Security Review
Are you dealing with spam, bots, or invalid clicks on your WordPress site? – We were too.
We’ll share our firsthand experience with CleanTalk, which we’ve been using since August 2021 on Softopaz.
You’ll understand how it effectively eliminates these frustrating issues and restores our site’s peace of mind.
Over the years, we have experienced different types of attacks, which gave us a better understanding of how CleanTalk helps us mitigate them effectively.
In this review of CleanTalk, we’ll tell our honest experience after using their major two plugins and services over years.
What is CleanTalk?
CleanTalk is a cloud-based anti-spam service designed to protect websites from spam and spambots.
How CleanTalk’s protection is different?
CleanTalk utilizes invisible protection methods, eliminating the need for visible verification methods like CAPTCHA or security questions, ensuring a seamless user experience.
Let’s explain our experience with their Anti-Spam Plugin and Security plugin separately.
Spam protection, Anti-Spam, Firewall Plugin
How CleanTalk’s Anti-Spam Works?
CleanTalk’s Anti-Spam plugin works by leveraging a cloud-based service to provide highly accurate spam protection for websites without disrupting your visitors’ experience.
Here’s a simplified breakdown of how it works:
- Submission and Data Transfer: When a user submits a comment, registration form, or contact form entry, the CleanTalk plugin instantly sends relevant data to the CleanTalk cloud service.
- Cloud-Based Analysis: The cloud service analyzes these parameters using sophisticated algorithms, comparing them against a vast database of known spam patterns and bot behavior.
- Intelligent Filtering: If the submission is deemed legitimate, it’s processed and published without any interruption. However, if the service detects spam or bot activity, it swiftly blocks the submission.
- Detailed Logging: Every interaction is logged, providing you with a comprehensive overview of the service’s activity through the CleanTalk dashboard.
This has allowed us to focus on content creation, knowing our site’s comment sections remain clean and relevant
Anti-Crawler Mode – How It Fixed Our Bot Traffic Issue
Before using the Anti-Crawler Mode, we were dealing with persistent attacks.
Someone had been trying to send us direct spamming/bot traffic, or attempting to scrape our site.
As you can see in this above Google Analytics Screenshot of our site, these spikes are caused by non-authentic users.
CleanTalk’s Anti-Crawler Mode provided a proactive and automated solution to this problem.
Anti-Crawler (Bot Protection) mode effectively addressed this issue by blocking various types of bots that engage in malicious activities.
Anti-Crawler Mode is designed to stop bots that search for vulnerabilities, attempt to hack sites, collect personal data, parse prices or content, generate 404 error pages, and engage in aggressive website scanning.
CleanTalk’s Spam Firewall – Extra Layer of Security
CleanTalk’s Cloud Firewall acts as an essential first line of defense, accurately blocking malicious IP addresses and bot traffic before they even reach the web site.
By filtering out bad actors at the gate, CleanTalk’s firewall helped us keep the site healthy and responsive.
Encode All Email Addresses on Pages
When you enable “Encode contact data” option, CleanTalk automatically encodes email addresses on the web pages. Users need to click on the encoded address to reveal it.
When you display other companies’ or partners’ emails on your website, this would be a safe approach.
Because it prevents their contact information from being harvested by spam bots, protecting them from unsolicited emails while still allowing legitimate users to easily access their contact details.
Website Search Form Protection
CleanTalk offers robust spam protection to website search forms as well. It stops bots from scraping your site’s data through search queries, preventing them from harvesting information for spam.
Our site uses AJAX search. This feature has been invaluable for us when blocking numerous spam requests and saving our system resources while maintaining optimal performance.
Security & Malware Scan Plugin
Along with CleanTalk’s anti-spam plugin, you can consider Security by CleanTalk for maximum protection.
Security by CleanTalk for WordPress provides comprehensive protection against various types of attacks, including brute-force login attempts, malware injections, and DDoS attacks.
Daily security reports keep you informed of potential threats, including incorrect password entries and suspicious IP addresses.
This proactive approach helps us maintain a secure WordPress environment by quickly identifying and addressing security vulnerabilities.
CleanTalk Security Firewall & Monitoring Features
- Real-time traffic monitor: Allows for immediate observation of site traffic, enabling quick response to anomalies.
- Brute-force Protection: Prevents automated attempts to guess passwords, securing login access.
- Website Firewall: Blocks malicious traffic before it reaches your site, providing an initial security layer.
- Malware Scanner: Detects and identifies malware, backdoors, and file modifications, ensuring site integrity.
- Security Report: Delivers daily summaries of security-related activity, keeping administrators informed of potential threats.
- Email Notifications: Immediately alerts administrators when someone logs in with administrative privileges, enhancing account security.
- Backend PHP logs: Provides detailed logs of PHP errors and activity, aiding in troubleshooting and security audits.
- Custom wp-login URL: Allows you to change the default WordPress login URL, making it harder for bots to find and attack.
- 2FA: Two-Factor Authentication: Adds an extra layer of security by requiring a second verification code, preventing unauthorized access even with stolen passwords.
- File System Watcher: Monitors changes to your website’s files, alerting you to potential malware or unauthorized modifications.
- Important File Monitoring: Specifically tracks critical files for alterations, ensuring core website components remain secure.
Traffic Control provides granular control over site traffic by analyzing the number of requests from each IP address within a user-defined time frame. This allows us to set a specific limit on page hits within minutes and block the visitors who exceed this threshold with their exhibit suspicious behavior.
CleanTalk on WordPress Dashboard
We’ve integrated CleanTalk’s widgets into the WordPress dashboard. This provides a centralized view of crucial anti-spam statistics and security statistics of the site.
The ‘Anti-Spam by CleanTalk’ and ‘Security by CleanTalk’ panels offer at-a-glance summaries of blocked requests, blocked attacks, and the top spam IPs. This allows us to quickly assess the web site’s security posture daily.
Moreover, the “last 10 actions in Cleantalk Widget” log provides recent administrative actions, providing valuable transparency within your WordPress backend.
CleanTalk Dashboard & Control Panel
CleanTalk provides a dedicated dashboard on cleantalk.org for managing and monitoring your all website’s anti-spam and security settings in one place.
Anti-Spam Service
Site Security
CleanTalk Control Panel Features
- Anti-Spam Log: Provides a detailed history of blocked and approved requests for analysis.
- SpamFireWall Statistics: Displays data on blocked malicious IP addresses and bot traffic.
- Top Spam IPs Blocked: Highlights the most frequent sources of spam attacks.
- Security FireWall and Bruteforce Stats: Shows the number of blocked security threats and brute-force attempts.
- 10 Last Actions in WP Dashboard: Offers an audit trail of recent administrative actions within WordPress.
- Personal Blacklists and Whitelists: Allows customization of blocked or allowed IP addresses and emails.
- Country Blocking: Enables blocking of traffic or submissions from specific countries.
- Stop-Words Filtering: Blocks comments containing specific words or phrases.
- Language Blocking: Filters comments and submissions based on language.
- Server Response Editing: Customizes the messages displayed to blocked users.
- Website Event Notifications: Sends alerts for specific website activities.
- Settings Templates: Allows saving and restoring plugin and dashboard settings.
- Website Access Delegation: Enables sharing website management with other users.
- Visited URLs Tracking: Logs the URLs visited by users before they submit forms.
CleanTalk Pricing
CleanTalk offers a cost-effective solution for website security and anti-spam, with pricing designed to scale with your needs.
These plans provide unlimited spam checks, ensuring comprehensive protection without worrying about usage limits.
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