Spam submissions are an annoying detect contact form spam and time-consuming issue for WordPress website owners. They not only waste your time and energy, but also take away from qualified leads and those who genuinely need to get in touch with you.
Bots and automated form spam can be particularly difficult to combat. But thankfully, there are plenty of ways to keep your contact form spam-free!
Detecting contact form spam with Google’s reCAPTCHA or a custom CAPTCHA is an effective way to stop automated bots from submitting contact forms. Basically, you can add a reCAPTCHA field to your WordPress form and let visitors prove that they are human by answering words or maths questions.
The Dangers of Contact Form Spam: How to Protect Your Business and Customers from Malicious Automation
With WPForms, a popular WordPress contact form plugin, you can even add several custom word questions that are cycled through randomly on the form with each page or post load. You can change these questions on a semi-regular basis, like monthly or quarterly, depending on how much spam you’re seeing.
Honeypot fields are another good way to prevent spam from your contact form. These hidden fields are invisible to real visitors, but they’re visible to bots.
If a bot tries to submit a spam message, they’ll see that the “honeypot” field has been filled out and will be blocked by the CAPTCHA.
You can also use a JavaScript token to protect your contact forms and message fields. This is a key that your site generates when a human visits the page, then it’s checked when the contact form is submitted and resets every day or two.
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