Free anti-spam for WordPress
If your WordPress site is sending spam emails, your contact form is filling with junk submissions, or your comments are disabled and you're still getting spam — the fix is to stop the bot before it submits. Prosopo Procaptcha is a free, privacy-first anti-spam plugin for WordPress that blocks bot form submissions across 16 popular form plugins — Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, WPForms, Ninja Forms and more.
10,000 verifications a month free, GDPR-compliant by design, no cookies, no tracking, and a drop-in replacement for reCAPTCHA. See pricing →
Already using Akismet? Procaptcha is the upgrade.
Akismet (the WordPress anti-spam plugin from Automattic) is a content classifier — it reads the text of a submission and guesses whether it's spam. That worked for blog comments selling watches in 2008. In 2026, it fails three ways:
- AI-written spam slips through. Modern bots write contact-form messages that read like real enquiries — no keyword filter catches them.
- It can't help non-comment forms. Signup forms, newsletter forms and contact forms have no "content" to classify — Akismet has nothing to score.
- It's reactive. By the time Akismet runs, the bot has already submitted, your server has already processed, and your downstream tools (autoresponders, CRM, Slack) have already fired.
Procaptcha blocks the bot, not the text — so it works on every form, against every spam pattern, before any of your tools see the submission. The free tier covers 10,000 verifications per month, which is more than most WordPress sites will ever need.
WordPress plugin integrations
Step-by-step install guides for stopping spam on every major WordPress form plugin:
How to add CAPTCHA to MemberPress
How to add CAPTCHA to Beaver Builder
How to add CAPTCHA to WP Forms
How to add CAPTCHA to User Registration Plugin
How to add CAPTCHA to Ninja Forms
How to add CAPTCHA to Jetpack
Gravity Forms Spam Protection: How to Stop Spam Submissions
How to add CAPTCHA to Formidable Forms
How to add CAPTCHA to Fluent Forms
How to add CAPTCHA to Everest Forms
Contact Form 7 Spam Protection: Stop CF7 Spam at the Source
How to add CAPTCHA to bbPress
Why your WordPress site is sending spam emails
If your WordPress site is suddenly sending spam emails — even with comments disabled, even with Akismet running, even after you've changed your admin password — the cause is almost always one of:
- A vulnerable contact form being abused by a bot to send spam through your site's mail server.
- A compromised plugin or theme with a known security vulnerability.
- An exposed signup endpoint bots use to register accounts and then post spam.
Procaptcha addresses the first and third — by putting an invisible CAPTCHA between the bot and your form, the spam stops at the door. For the second, audit your installed plugins and keep them updated.
Free anti-spam protection that actually works
The official Procaptcha WordPress plugin gets you free anti-spam protection for any form on your site — 10,000 verifications per month, no cookies, no tracking, full GDPR compliance. For most small WordPress sites that's all the spam protection you'll ever need.
For the full picture see our spam bot protection use case.
