How To Avoid Your Website Contact Form Get Spam

Form Spam is the submission of website forms that contain unwanted information by human users or spambots. Contact form plays an important role in your online business and help in robust digital marketing strategy. Contact form spam can be annoying to website owner to deal with and here are the ways to avoid your website contact form get spam.

1. Use reCAPTCHA 

reCAPTCHA is a program that can verify that human users is filling up the contact form. This can help to reduce spam, and offer better user experience to the visitors. By having reCAPTCHA in your website contact form, it can ensure that your website don’t get flooded by spam messages. People can easily mouse over the checkbox and the tool will realise that it’s not an automated spambot. This method is easy and effective for blocking spam form submissions. 

2. Use Honeypot anti-spam

Honeypot method is coding that added a hidden field in your contact form. This hidden form is cover up by using css or javascript. Honeypots field display forms that appear to spambots only. Human users can’t see the hidden field and will leave it blank while spambots will fill out the field. If the honeypot field is filled, then the form will marked as spam and reject the submission. By using honeypots method, it create more friendly user experience to the visitors because they will not be bothered by the hidden form. 

To set up honeypot field in Elementor, go to Form Fields and  select the Type as Honeypot. Recommend to add 3 honeypot fields and can label as e.g. State, Postcode, age

 

3.  Use a Custom CAPTCHA

Custom CAPTCHA enable you to add custom word-based or random math questions in your form and fight spam submissions. The form will display a question for users to answer the custom questions before they submit the form.  For example,  the image show a math question (1 multiply by 4 ) appear and users must fill in the answers in order to submit the form. The questions for visitors to answer must be easy to understand to prevent them from abandon the form. 

4. Disallow links in contact form

Another way to avoid website contact form getting spam is don’t allow links in the contact form submissions. This practice is useful to spambots that programmed to leave junk links in the form submissions. Disallow links in the contact form prevent spambots and human users from adding links to your form.

5. Use WordPress Antispam Plugins

Besides that, you also can use anti-spam or contact form plugins for WordPress such as Akismet, Antispam Bee, Hide My WP, WordPress Form etc. that can protect your website from spam entries. This plugins work independently to protect your website contact form from getting spam comments and form submissions. It is good to go through these plugins first before start using them. 

Conclusion

These are the ways you can protect your website contact form from spam. Avoid your website contact form get spam can improve website latency and user experience of your website to protect your website from malware and malicious actions. The most recommended way is reCAPTCHA which is simple and better user experience for visitors to use. Instead of typing text or solving puzzles, visitors just need to checked the checkbox. Furthermore, it helps your site from being inundated with bots. It is recommended to use more than 1 way so that your website can achieve double-barrelled spam protection.