How to Hide (Encode) Contacts on WordPress Website From Crawlers and Bots

• Email Addresses Encoding
• Phone Numbers Encoding
• Encoder Obfuscation Mode
• Encoding Contact Data with a Shortcode and Hook for Third-Party Plugins
• Hooks For Changing the Encode Contact Data Option Phrases
• Checking the Encoding

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.

Please, click the icon with a question mark in the CleanTalk plugin settings to see the full list of supported phone number formats.

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

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

Modes of Obfuscation

You can set up the way of how the hidden email/phone is being displayed on the website public pages before decoding.
Let's see what you can choose from on these examples:
• email address — yourmail@yourmaildomain.com
• phone — +1 234 5678910

1. Blur effect
The contact will be partially replaced with the blur effect:

2. Replace with "*" symbol
The contact will be partially replaced with asterisks:
• email address — yo******@************in.com
• phone — +1 23*******01

3. Replace with the custom text
The contact will be totally replaced with the custom text from the appropriate setting field.

How to Check If Email Encoding Is Working

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.

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

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

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