How to Set Up Wordpress Akismet Plugin

In this blog post, I am going to show you how to setup wordpress akismet plugin for your wordpress website or blog. Steps are pretty simple. But first let me tell you what akismet plugin is and what it can do for your site.

What is Akismet?

Akismet is most probably one of the best wordpress plugin that will take your pain out of managing comment spam. It makes sure that spam does not screw with your search engine rankings, and also offers you a whole lot more time to join with your subscribers, rather than working through page after page of junk comments.

Akismet monitors your blog or website comments against the Akismet Web service to observe if they seem like spam or not and allows you analyze the spam it grabs under your website’s/blog’s “Comments” admin panel.

Why Akismet is mandatory for site owners?

Akismet is absolutely mandatory for WordPress blog or website owners as it can:

quickly monitors all comments and filters out the ones that look like spam.
discard function that instantly hinders the worst spam, protecting your disk space and speed up your site.
check every single comment. Each comment maintains a status history, for this reason you can simply see which comments were cleared or caught by Akismet and which were unspammed or spammed by a moderator
show number of approved comments. Blog/Website admins as well as moderators can see the number of approved comments for every single user.
check URLs that are presented in the body of the comment to reveal invisible or suspicious links.

How to Set Up WordPress Akismet Plugin

Login to your wordpress admin panel
Mouse over to Plugins and then click on “Add New”
On the “Search Plugins” box, type “Akismet” without the quote.
You will see the WordPress Akismet plugin. Now click on “Install Now”

After that, click on “Activate plugin”

You will see something like above image. But it’s not over yet!

Now you need to click on “Settings”
You will see a page like the following image:

This is the activation window of WordPress Akismet plugin. You need to get your API key and manually enter that API key in the box and then hit the “Use this key” button. But remember you should have a WordPress.com account to activate wordpress akismet plugin.

So if you don’t have an API key already, click on “Get your API key” button.

You will be redirected to wordpress akismet plugin homepage.

Now click on “Get an Akismet API Key”

If you are already logged in to your “WordPress.com” account then you will see following image:

You need to click on “Approve” button the get your API key.

If you are not logged into your “WordPress.com” account, then you will see following image:

Here you will get “Sign Up” option. If you don’t have a wordpress.com account then please sign up here. Otherwise, click on “I already have a wordpress.com account”

After signing in, you will see several options for wordpress akismet plugin. If you want to upgrade the plan of your wordpress akismet then you need to select either plus, backup or enterprise option. But if you like to use the free version of akismet wordpress plugin then you need to click on the Basic edition. Here I am going to show you the Basic version. Click on “Get Started” button under the Basic package.

Now why it’s showing me $36/year option though I have chosen the “Basic” edition of wordpress akismet? It’s confusing and annoying right?

Don’t worry. Here is the trick. Drag the button to the very left and then you will get $0.00/year option!

Now click on “Continue” button.

You will get your wordpress akismet plugin API in this step. Just copy the API key and paste it in “Manually enter an API key” box and hit “Use this key” button. You will see the status:

Now all processes are complete. You have successfully activated “WordPress Akismet Plugin” on your site. If you like this tutorial please express your thoughts via comments.

Here is the video tutorial of this blog post! You can quickly watch this video tutorial to learn how to setup wordpress akismet plugin.

About Ekhlas Uddin Jewel

Ekhlas Uddin Jewel is Google Adwords certified individual & SEO, SEM, SMM specialist from Bangladesh. He is the founder of SEO-Service-Provider.Org. For large SEO/Adwords project(s), please feel free to contact him.