How to Protect Emails from Spammers with WordPress Email Encoder

Do you want to share your email address on your WordPress website or WooCommerce store without getting caught by spam bots?

When you add an email link or plain text email address, it will most likely be copied by a spam email harvesting bot.

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 you at risk for a lot of 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 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 simply 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.

We hope this article helped you protect email addresses in WordPress from spammers. You may also want to see our complete WordPress security tutorial and our expert picks of the best WordPress security plugins.

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