How to Hide (Encode) contacts on WordPress website from Crawlers and Bots

 

 

The CleanTalk Anti-Spam plugin can encode email addresses and phone numbers on your website. This makes them unreadable to spambots that scan public pages for contact information.

Hiding emails and phone numbers prevents your data from being harvested and added to spam mailing lists or used for unwanted calls. Visitors will still be able to see and use your contact details, but bots will only see encoded or partially hidden versions.

You can enable this option in the Contact Data Encoding section here:

  • WordPress Dashboard → Settings → Anti-Spam by CleanTalk → Advanced settings

 

Encode contact data option

 

  1. Open your webpage in your browser in Guest (Incognito) mode.
  2. Scroll down the page to the email address. Now you should see that the email is already encrypted.

To decrypt it, just click on it. If you hover the mouse pointer over the email, you will see the “This contact was encoded by CleanTalk. Click to decode” message. It is a hint for your website visitors. Be sure to test the encryption/decryption in Guest (Incognito) mode, because if you are authorized on the site, there will be no encryption.

 

Encoded message with hint

Since version 5.184 of the Anti-Spam plugin, each email encoding is logged in your Anti-Spam Log with the status "Decoding approved".

Decoded email in Anti-Spam log

 

If you haven't found the answer to your question, please contact our support team:

https://cleantalk.org/my/support/open

 

 

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