Gatekeep – Spam Protection & Form Security

by gatekeepwp

Description

Stop spam without annoying your visitors.

Gatekeep protects virtually every form on your WordPress site – not just contact forms.

Whether visitors are logging in, registering, checking out, leaving comments or submitting a form you wrote yourself, Gatekeep quietly analyses every submission and stops suspicious activity before it reaches your inbox.

Unlike traditional CAPTCHA plugins, Gatekeep uses risk scoring, honeypots, timing analysis, rate limiting and a dozen other signals to detect bots with almost no friction for real people. Most visitors never see a challenge at all.

Every form, not just one

Contact forms
Login, registration and password reset
WooCommerce checkout and account creation
Comments
BuddyPress and bbPress
Membership and LMS plugins
Page-builder forms
Custom-coded forms – two function calls, or none at all with the universal guard

CAPTCHA for Contact Form 7 – without the CAPTCHA

Searching for a Contact Form 7 CAPTCHA usually means one thing: the form is drowning in spam. Gatekeep protects CF7 the moment it is activated – including the AJAX submission path most honeypot plugins miss – with nothing visible added to the form. The same is true for WPForms, Gravity Forms, Fluent Forms, Formidable, Ninja Forms, Elementor forms and the WooCommerce checkout: install, click Protect my website, done. If you specifically want a visible challenge, four self-hosted ones are included – no Google account, no site keys.

What it caught that other filters did not

Every anti-spam plugin reports what it blocked. None report what they missed – which is the number that actually tells you whether you are protected.

Gatekeep records every submission, clean ones included, so its totals have a denominator: not “12 blocked” but “12 blocked of 4,310”. Monitor Mode goes further and scores submissions without blocking any, alongside whatever protection you already run, so you can read a week of real verdicts before changing anything. Nothing else on the plugin directory will tell you what your current filter is letting through.

Signals a human spammer cannot avoid

Most anti-spam checks measure how a form was submitted – speed, tokens, hidden fields. Someone typing at human speed passes all of them. Gatekeep also reads what was sent:

Imitating sender domains. Mail from search-yoursite.com when you are yoursite.com. Nobody legitimate writes to you from a domain built out of yours.
Disguised web addresses. “example dot com”, “example[.]org”, “hxxps://” – written that way to slip past filters, and scored precisely because honest correspondents never do it.
Link density. A short message that is mostly links.
Repeated messages. The same pitch arriving again and again, recognised even when names, numbers and links are varied between sends.
Malformed payloads. Submissions carrying hundreds of fields or nested absurdly deep to push the real message past a scanner.

Smarter than a captcha

Traditional captcha asks everyone to prove they are human. Gatekeep asks the submission instead, scoring signals the visitor never sees: honeypot traps, impossible submission speed, disposable email addresses, scripted HTTP clients and headless browsers, rate limits, invalid form tokens, missing browser headers and invisible link traps.

Only ambiguous submissions ever meet a challenge – and if you want one, four self-hosted options need no account and no keys.

Monitor Mode: prove it is safe before it blocks

Losing a real customer costs more than receiving spam. So Gatekeep starts in Monitor Mode: for the first week it watches, scores, logs and explains every decision without blocking anything. You switch enforcement on when the verdicts look right.

More than spam protection

A 17-point security audit checks for weak configuration – default admin accounts, unrotated salts, exposed config backups, the built-in file editor, XML-RPC, missing HTTPS, end-of-life PHP, pending updates and dormant plugins. Every finding explains what to do; nothing is changed automatically.

A security event log records who changed what: role changes, sign-ins and failures, plugin and theme changes, password and email changes, and critical settings.

Features

Intelligent risk scoring rather than puzzles
Universal form protection, including custom-coded forms
Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, WPForms, Fluent Forms, Formidable, Ninja Forms, MetForm
WooCommerce, BuddyPress, bbPress, MemberDash, Academy LMS, Bloom
Divi 4 and 5, Elementor Pro, Bricks, Avada, Thrive, WPBakery, Oxygen, Beaver Builder
Honeypot, timing analysis, rate limiting, disposable email detection
Four self-hosted challenges – maths, image, checkbox and proof-of-work
reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha and Turnstile supported if you already use them
Login, registration and comment protection
Security audit and security event log
Developer API and shortcode
Privacy friendly – hashed IP addresses, no third-party tracking
No API keys required
Works with page caching
No JavaScript in the default configuration

Switching from a CAPTCHA or another anti-spam plugin?

Coming from reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha or Turnstile: keep it, install Gatekeep in Monitor Mode beside it, and watch the log for a fortnight. You will see exactly what your captcha lets through – measured on your own traffic, not claimed by a vendor. Most sites then retire the puzzle; Gatekeep even ships a reCAPTCHA-compatible siteverify endpoint so custom code can switch by changing one URL.

Coming from Akismet or another comment filter: they classify comment text; Gatekeep protects the forms they never see – registration, login, checkout, contact. The two can run together, and the Compatibility screen shows the overlap so it stays a decision, not an accident.

Coming from a honeypot plugin: Gatekeep’s honeypot uses a field name derived from your own site’s salts, so bots cannot learn it elsewhere – and it is one signal of a dozen rather than the whole defence.

Measured, not promised

~380 bytes added to a form, no JavaScript by default
Blocked submissions decided in under 5 ms
1,200+ automated assertions pass on every release, on WordPress and WooCommerce current versions
Nothing loads for a visitor except what a page view needs – admin, licensing and hardening code stay out of the way

Free forever, and what Pro adds

Everything that is code is free – and the code agrees. The engine, all 33 integrations, Monitor Mode, the activity log, the dashboard health score, the 17-point security audit, protection profiles, the coexistence report, IP and keyword rules, advanced signals, settings export/import and all four challenges including the image one: free, with no licence prompt anywhere.

The paid tier buys hosted services that need someone on duty: the disposable-email-domain feed of 75,000+ entries refreshed daily, IP reputation, hosted verification, the Fortify hardening pack (a separate companion plugin you download from your account and install like any other plugin), and priority support. This plugin never downloads or installs other software. See plans and pricing.

Your forms never depend on the licence: if it lapses, protection keeps working and you keep the version you have.

Third-party assets

Two font families are bundled and served from the plugin folder, so no
visitor request is ever made to a font CDN:

IBM Plex Sans – Copyright 2017 IBM Corp, SIL Open Font License v1.1 – https://github.com/IBM/plex
Bricolage Grotesque – Copyright 2022 The Bricolage Project Authors, SIL Open Font License v1.1 – https://github.com/ateliertriay/bricolage

Both licences are GPL-compatible. Full attribution is in assets/FONT-LICENSES.txt.

Friendly Captcha SDK (assets/vendor/friendly-captcha/site.min.js and site.compat.min.js)
Version 1.0.2, Mozilla Public License 2.0, unmodified.
Source: https://github.com/FriendlyCaptcha/friendly-captcha-sdk
Licence text: assets/vendor/friendly-captcha/LICENSE.txt
Bundled locally rather than loaded from a CDN.

External services

Gatekeep makes no outbound requests in its default configuration. Nothing below happens unless you switch that feature on yourself.

Each service is listed with what it is, what is sent, when it is sent, and links to its terms and privacy policy.

1. Google reCAPTCHA (optional, off by default)

What it is: Google’s CAPTCHA service. Used only if you select reCAPTCHA as a challenge provider and enter your own site and secret keys.

What is sent, and when: when a visitor loads a page carrying a form you have enabled reCAPTCHA on, their browser loads Google’s widget script from www.google.com and Google receives the visitor’s IP address, browser information and interaction data. When that form is submitted, your server sends the challenge token, your secret key and the visitor’s IP address to www.google.com to verify the answer. No form content is sent.

2. hCaptcha (optional, off by default)

What it is: an alternative CAPTCHA service. Used only if you select hCaptcha and enter your own keys.

What is sent, and when: on a page with an hCaptcha-enabled form, the visitor’s browser loads the widget from js.hcaptcha.com and hCaptcha receives their IP address, browser information and interaction data. On submission, your server sends the challenge token, your secret key and the visitor’s IP address to api.hcaptcha.com. No form content is sent.

3. Cloudflare Turnstile (optional, off by default)

What it is: Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA alternative. Used only if you select Turnstile and enter your own keys.

What is sent, and when: on a page with a Turnstile-enabled form, the visitor’s browser loads the widget from challenges.cloudflare.com and Cloudflare receives their IP address and browser information. On submission, your server sends the challenge token, your secret key and the visitor’s IP address to challenges.cloudflare.com to verify it. No form content is sent.

4. Friendly Captcha (optional, off by default)

What it is: a proof-of-work CAPTCHA service. Used only if you select Friendly Captcha and enter your own keys.

The widget script is bundled with this plugin and served from your own site, so no script is loaded from a third party. Verification is still performed by Friendly Captcha, because that is the service being used.

What is sent, and when: when a visitor solves the challenge, their browser contacts Friendly Captcha’s puzzle endpoint. On submission, your server sends the challenge response and your API key to global.frcapi.com, or to eu.frcapi.com if you select their EU-only infrastructure. No form content is sent.

Terms of service: https://friendlycaptcha.com/legal/terms/
Privacy policy: https://friendlycaptcha.com/legal/privacy-end-users/

5. Gatekeep licence and threat list at gatekeepwp.com (optional, off by default)

What it is: the licensing and threat-list service operated by the plugin author. It is contacted only if you buy a licence and enter the key. Without a key it is never contacted.

What is sent, and when: on licence activation, and once daily while a licence is active, your site sends the licence key and your site address to gatekeepwp.com to validate the licence and to download the current threat list. This is a server-to-server request. No visitor data, no IP addresses and no form content are ever sent.

6. ipapi.co (optional, off by default, requires the Pro companion)

What it is: a geolocation lookup used only if you enable “Look up country when the host does not provide it” and the Gatekeep Pro companion is installed. The free plugin never contacts this service.

What is sent, and when: the visitor’s IP address is sent server-to-server to ipapi.co so a country code can be cached for a day. No form content is sent. Sign-in attempts are never blocked by country.

Installation

Install through Plugins Add New, or upload the folder to /wp-content/plugins/.
Activate. Gatekeep finds the forms on your site by itself — there is nothing to add to a form, no key to paste and no account to create.
Open Gatekeep in the admin menu. The first screen shows what it found and what it recommends.
Leave Monitor Mode on for a fortnight if you would rather watch before it blocks anything, then turn blocking on when you are happy with the verdicts.

Faq

Will it conflict with what I already have?

There is a Compatibility screen that answers this directly. It lists every form
plugin and builder it found, names any captcha your plugins already have switched
on, names any other anti-spam plugin that is running, and says whether anything
actually conflicts.

If your form plugin already has reCAPTCHA, Gatekeep will not add a second
challenge to those forms. If another anti-spam plugin is active, both can run –
and the screen suggests leaving Monitor Mode on for the first couple of days, so
you can see whether the two ever disagree before either blocks anything.

Will this block real customers?

Not while Monitor Mode is on, and that is the default. Rate limiting is also skipped at WooCommerce checkout so shared IP addresses cannot lock out a sale.

Does it slow my site down?

The default configuration adds no JavaScript and makes no external requests. Assets load only on pages where a protected form is actually rendered.

Is it accessible?

The honeypot is hidden from assistive technology and removed from the tab order. The default configuration presents no visual puzzle at all.

How do I stop Contact Form 7 spam without a CAPTCHA?

Install Gatekeep and click Protect my website. CF7 is one of the 33 built-in integrations – including its AJAX submission path, which honeypot-only plugins often miss. No markup changes, no keys.

Does it work with Elementor forms and other page builders?

Yes: Elementor Pro forms, Divi 4 and 5, Bricks, Avada, Thrive, WPBakery, Oxygen, Beaver Builder and SeedProd are covered, plus a universal guard for anything unusual.

Does it protect the WooCommerce checkout?

Yes, with a dedicated shop profile: nothing visible in front of a buyer, tolerance for password-manager-speed submissions, and rate limits that a busy shop will not trip.

Is Gatekeep GDPR friendly?

Decisions are made on your own server and nothing is sent to a third party. Visitor IP addresses are stored hashed, and the default configuration sets no cookies and loads no external scripts.

Is Gatekeep an alternative to Akismet or reCAPTCHA?

For form, registration, login and checkout protection, yes. For classifying comment text specifically, Akismet’s twenty years of data remain excellent – many sites run both, and Gatekeep will happily coexist and show you the overlap.

Do I need an account or API key?

No. The free plugin works completely offline with no account, no keys and no external service.

Reviews

Changelog

1.0

First public release.

Local features (security score, image challenge, allowlists, blocked terms, MX checks, the bundled disposable-domain list, the security audit and the event log) are free in both code and documentation. A licence only buys hosted services and the optional companion plugin, which you install yourself.
The universal form guard uses WordPress 6.9’s template enhancement output buffer when available. On older WordPress it wraps the template in a paired ob_start() / ob_get_clean() in the same function, and includes the theme via load_template() so $post and $wp_query stay in scope.
Directory-listing advice no longer writes index.php or .htaccess outside a plugin-specific uploads folder.
Field HTML is escaped with wp_kses() at every output sink, including render_block / the_content filter callbacks.
Compatibility tracking no longer reads visitor POST or writes transients from the front end.
Pro entitlement can no longer be granted from the site itself. The gatekeep_can_use filter may now only restrict a capability, never grant one; developers who need an unlocked build locally have GATEKEEP_DEV_UNLOCK, which refuses to run on anything that looks like a production hostname.
Licence answers from the licence server are verified with an Ed25519 signature and re-checked on every capability query, so editing the stored licence record by hand no longer unlocks anything.
Disposable-address checks and MX checks moved to the free tier. Both run entirely on your own server and the data file already ships in this package, so gating them was never defensible.
Uninstalling now removes everything the plugin created, including the visitor-reputation and domain tables and the stored licence record.
On multisite, deleting a site now drops that site’s Gatekeep tables instead of leaving them behind.
Protects every entry point, not just contact forms: 33 form plugins, page-builder forms, WordPress login, registration, password reset and comments, WooCommerce checkout and account creation, plus a universal guard for forms belonging to no plugin at all.
Over twenty scoring signals. Honeypot, submission timing, form tokens, rate and subnet limits, request shape, field integrity, visitor reputation, disposable and role addresses, MX checks, imitating sender domains, disguised web addresses, link density, repeated messages and malformed payloads.
Monitor Mode: score submissions without blocking any, alongside whatever protection you already run, and see what it is letting through.
Every submission recorded, clean ones included, so totals have a denominator — not “12 blocked” but “12 blocked of 4,310”.
Every verdict explained by the signals behind it, in plain sentences.
Eight challenge options if you want a visible check, four of them self-hosted with no keys and no third party.
Nothing leaves your site. Scoring happens on your own server.
Honest about what it did not check. If your challenge provider is unreachable, submissions are still allowed so your forms keep working — but the log records that they were allowed WITHOUT verification rather than claiming they passed, and Diagnostics counts it.
Correct under load. The repeat-message and token counters are incremented by the database itself rather than read-modify-written, so a burst of traffic cannot make the counts drift — which matters because a burst is exactly when those checks are needed.
Bounded under attack. Storage a spammer can force Gatekeep to use is capped: message and token memory live in fixed-size stores rather than growing a row per submission, the activity log has a row ceiling as well as a retention period, and there is a limit on how much text one submission can make the server read.
Understands what sits in front of your site. Behind Cloudflare, a load balancer or a reverse proxy, Gatekeep identifies the real visitor rather than the proxy — so rate limits and reputation apply to one person instead of your entire audience. Diagnostics tells you if it needs setting.
Clears WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, LiteSpeed, SG Optimizer, WP Super Cache and other page caches on activation, on update and whenever you change a setting — so a stored copy of yesterday’s page never makes a working plugin look broken. There is a manual button on Diagnostics, and it tells you plainly if a cache could not be reached rather than claiming success.