The internets are — unfortunately — full of unsavory folks who’d love to harvest and use your email address for gross things like spam. Which we get totally annoyed by, right? But at the same time, you want people to be able to contact you from your website. So how can you protect your inbox from spammers?

How to protect your email address

1. Use an image

This method takes a little work and isn’t as user friendly when you post it on your website, but it works. Using Canva or Photoshop or any other image editing program, type your email address out and save it as a gif. Then upload it to your website and voila! Humans can read your email address while you’ve protected it from spammers.

2. Be clever with plain text

I like this one because it totally fools the harvesting robots and protect your email address. Instead of typing your email address out fully, for example doc@delorean.com, you would type it like doc [at] delorean [dot] com. Humans get it, robots don’t.

3. Use a contact form

Although contact forms can also be vulnerable to shady dudes, there are plenty of free WordPress contact form plugins that do a wicked job of combating spam submissions. Contact Form 7, for example, integrates with Akismet to create a slick yet simple solution. Need more control over your form? Check out Ninja Forms which includes a robust honeypot feature to combat spam.

Protecting your email address is only ONE of the tools that you can use to build and maintain a healthy, professional, and super-slick website. There are so many more.