Uses wp_cron to delete comments each day that are marked "spam" in the database.
As of April 2026, Delete Spam Daily is a WordPress cron plugin with 80 active installations and a 5/5 rating from 1 reviews. It has been downloaded 9.4K+ times in total. Requires WordPress 2.1.0+ and PHP false+. Available on WordPress.org since 2009. Last updated 16 years ago — may have compatibility concerns. Top alternative: WP Crontrol.
This plugin schedules a daily event using wp_cron that deletes all comments marked “spam” in the database, then optimizes the comments table.
Brief reason why I made such a low-tech plugin:
Akismet catches all the spam, but when I was looking at the size of my backups one day,
I noticed that there were large numbers of comment spam across several sites that were undeleted and they
made the databases fairly large. So I setup a cron job on my server that deletes the spam.
Since I had never written a plugin, I thought this might be helpful for those who do not have
a dedicated server, shell access to their site, or the knowledge of (or interest in ) cron to set this up.
Spam is not deleted until you start the schedule after the plugin is activated. I created buttons
to start and…
| WordPress | 2.1.0+ requiredTested up to 2.7.1 |
| PHP | false+ required |
wp_comments table after spam is deleted. Updated DB call to allow for alternate wordpress table prefix. add_action was added to the “Delete Spam Daily” button so it would actually delete spam once a day. 🙂 In addition to a “Stop Deleting Spam” button, a button was added that reschedules the cron to happen in 1 minute so you can be sur…Plugin data sourced from WordPress.org. Analysis and metrics by PluginSift.