Do you want to share your email address on your website without getting caught by spam bots? When you add an email link or plain text email address, it will most likely be copied by an spam email harvesting bot. In this article, we will show you how to easily protect emails from spammers with email encoder.
Why is Email Encoding Important?
Most website owners don’t realize that pasting their email address into their posts, pages, or on a contact page can put you at risk for a lot of email spam.
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.
Now 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.
Protecting Email Addresses from Spammers
First thing you need to do is instal and activate the Email Address Encoder plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
The plugin works out of the box, and there are no settings for you to configure.
Once you activate the plugin, Email Address Encoder simply starts encoding email addresses in WordPress posts and pages, custom post types, widgets, etc.
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 email addresses encoded looks like this:
This way when an email harvesting bot visit your page source, they will not be able to see the email addresses.
However, real human users will see the plain text email addresses in their browser window.
That’s all. We hope this article helped you protect email addresses in WordPress from spammers. You may also want to see our guide on 24 must have WordPress plugins for business websites.
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dave henderson says
Is there any free WP plugins for this?
I installed the plugin linked in this post but see their free version does not protect the entire website…
WPBeginner Support says
Instead of having the email address public on your WordPress site, we would recommend using a contact form as those do not display your email for spammers to collect and would still give your visitors the option to reach out to you.
We have a list of contact forms below that you may find helpful!
https://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/5-best-contact-form-plugins-for-wordpress-compared/
Admin
Cos says
WordPress Email Encoder works well for email addresses in posts, pages, comments, excerpts and text widgets.
It has no effect on email addresses in a header… are there any plugins that do this?
Nathan says
Good tutorial on Protect Emails from Spammers with WordPress Email Encoder. Thanks for this tutorial
Nathan says
Good tutoral for email spammer on wordpress worth to read and implement on our websites