5 Awesome WordPress Profanity Filter Plugins

Anyone who owns a WordPress site is likely to have issues with profanity at one time or another. Having profane words on your site is likely to put off some readers who might leave and never return. A reduced level of traffic means loss of potential sales for businesses and companies. Here are some great WordPress plugins which can help you deal with the problem of profanity.

1. Word Replacer

Word Replacer is a plugin which allows you to substitute profane words with other suitable alternatives. For instance, if people are frequently using the word ‘godammit’ on your site, you could use this plugin to replace it with the word ‘drat’. The main disadvantage of using this plugin is that it might take a long time to create word replacements, especially if your site is very prone to profanity. However, once the replacements are set up, the plugin automatically takes care of the rest. The great thing about Word Replacer is that you can choose the specific part of your site where you would want to filter words.

2. Word Filter Plus

Just like Word Replacer, Word Filter Plus allows you to do replace explicit or profane words with other suitable alternatives. Once the filter is configured, this plugin checks your whole site for profane words. This includes words used recently, as well as those in your archives. However, besides handling profanity, you can also use Word Filter Plus to edit your content quickly. For example, you can change the way your email address appears on different pages without having to visit each page individually.

3. WebPurify

This plugin comes with a comprehensive list of profane words/phrases in English as well as other languages such as Chinese, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic. Anytime someone posts a profane word in your site, WebPurify automatically replaces it with asterisks. If you want to have advanced filtering ability, you might want to opt for the premium version. WebPurify premium allows you to not only filter your text, but also your videos and images.

4. WP Content Filter

WP Content Filter has stricter filtering options compared to other filters. If any flagged word appears as part of a whole word, it will be ignored entirely. For example, if you flag the word ‘back’ and someone posts ‘backpack’, the whole word will be ignored. WP Content Filter has a great feature which enables you to keep the last or first letters of the replaced word. For example, ‘backpack’ can be filtered to appear like ‘b******k’.

5. Defensio Anti-spam

This is one of the few plugins which can deal with profane content as well as spamming problems. It has features which can provide profanity filtering, malicious content detection, URL categorization and script detection. The main disadvantage of this Defensio Anti-spam is that it is not compatible with other anti-spam plugins. Therefore, before using installing it, you will need to deactivate all other related plugins such as Akismet.