Are you looking to eliminate spam in your WordPress contact forms? This guide has great tips for you.
One of the greatest problems and threats to any website using WordPress contact forms is the tendency of spam and form abuse. This can be very frustrating for most website owners, but fortunately, there are many effective ways to combat this problem without having to do it manually. This article explains some top tips to avoid spam in your WordPress contact forms.
See also: What are Email Newsletters? How to Start One and Gain Subscribers
Top Tips to Avoid Spam in Your WordPress Contact Forms
Enable reCAPTCHA
Many contact forms plugins support third-party spam prevention services like Google’s reCAPTCHA. This is a popular and effective way to protect your contact forms from spam. It prompts individuals to prove that they are human by solving puzzles. reCAPTCHA is sometimes an inbuilt feature in some contact forms or anti-spam plugins.
Install a Firewall Security Plugin
Website spam is usually caused by spam bots that automatically flood websites with unwanted content. They generate spam comments and malicious information and fill contact forms with irrelevant information.
To effectively handle this problem, you should install a Firewall security plugin. The Firewall plugin can differentiate between legitimate and malicious bots, providing services like login protection, malware scanning, vulnerability monitoring, and one-click malware removal. The best Firewall plugins include Ninja, Firewall, CleanTalk, Shield Security, Defender, Wordfence Security, etc.
Choose the Best Anti-spam Plugin
An anti-spam plugin scans databases for known spam content and patterns, including words, links, IP addresses, and email addresses. These contents can be from users or bots, but they will flag them as spam when they notice any of them.
They do not only reduce spam in contact forms. They work across your entire website and will reduce malicious comments as well. So, an anti-spam plugin is also a great way to tackle spam in your WordPress contact form.
Block Spam Active IP Addresses
A very good way to block spammers in your contact form is to block users that have bypassed your CAPTCHA by blacklisting their IP addresses. Everyone who leaves a comment on your site leaves their IP addresses, so if you repeatedly see the same IP address attacking your site with spam, you can block or blacklist it.
To do this, go to your WordPress dashboard and locate the settings. Then, click ”Discussion” and enter the IP addresses you wish to block in the ”Disallowed Comment Keys” text field.
Restrict Submissions by Country
The spammers attacking your contact forms may be from a specific country. You can check their IP location to see if it is correct. If you get a lot of spam from users in one country, you can use a country filter to accept or deny submissions from that location. This will add an extra layer of spam protection to your WordPress contact form.
Enable Cloudflare Turnstile for Your Form
The Cloudflare Turnstile is a CAPTCHA solution that can provide security against bot spammers. It adds a simple checkbox to your form to verify your users before they can submit a form on your website. This is a great alternative to Recaptcha. It is free and very effective in providing high-performance standards to protect your site from data harvesting.
Block Copy and Paste in Your Forms
This is another fantastic way to protect your contact forms from spam, especially human spammers. It stops them from copying and pasting their information into your forms. Additionally, it prevents people from stealing content from anywhere on your website. You can do this by downloading a plugin that turns off the right-click function everywhere on your site.
Require Email Verification for New Users
Spammers and bots can use fake emails to sign up for your site, but an easy way to prevent this is to require email verification. This is an extra step to prove that a user’s email address is valid, and spammers wouldn’t have patience with this or be unable to verify their email addresses.
Block Profanity in Form Submissions
Getting spammed from human submissions can be tricky as it would be difficult to block them; the contact form spam from human submissions differs from that of a bot, so the CAPTCHAs may not block them.
You can use a keyword filter tool or some other plugin to deal with this type of spam. You will need to provide the list of keywords to look for, and those spammers will be automatically blocked. But you must be careful so you don’t block legitimate submissions.
Use Honeypot Fields
This is an invisible and very clever way to combat contact form spam on your WordPress site. The honey pot fields are added to your contact forms but are invisible to human users. Human users cannot fill out the honeypot field.
However, when a bot fills out the contact form, it unknowingly interacts with the honeypot field, and the submissions will be automatically rejected as spam. Honeypot fields are usually built into anti-spam plugins, and even though they are not sufficient to combat spam on their own, they can provide an additional layer of security for your contact forms.
See also: What is Email Marketing? How It Works and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Contact forms are essential for your website. They can help you generate leads and give your site visitors an avenue to communicate with you, but it can be frustrating if they become a source of spam.
That is why you should consider the tips we have discussed in this guide, and it is okay to use more than one method to protect your contact forms from spam; using one method may not give you the results you desire, but a combination of one or more methods will be very effective to ensure a spam free contact form.
FAQs
What is WordPress Contact Forms Spam?
WordPress contact form spam usually happens when a bot automatically fills out your contact forms, although humans can sometimes do this. This spam typically points to malware, sales messages, or phishing links.
What is the Best Form Plugin for Spam Prevention?
Many amazing form plugins for spam prevention include WP, Formidable, Ninja, and Fluent Forms. These plugins come with many amazing anti-spam features, and some integrate seamlessly with other anti-spam methods like reCAPTCHA.
What is the Best Tactic to Prevent Spam Contact Forms?
All the tips we have discussed in this guide are very effective; you have to choose the ones that are convenient for you to combine. However, just know that you can never do too much to protect your contact forms from spam, so feel free to explore as many options as possible.