Want To Block Irritating Contact Form Spam In Your WordPress Website – Find The Best Ways Here

Website contact forms are a crucial part of any website. They allow the visitors of your website to get in touch with you instantly without the need to navigate to their email accounts. They also permit the website owners to make a choice on the kind of information they are expecting from the visitor. However, it is a bitter truth that the spammers love website forms too. 

Spamming associated with contact forms on WordPress websites has become a big concern at the present date. It is very unfortunate to discover that your contact form is filled with spam submissions and every website owner has to suffer from this pain at one point of time or the other if not properly taken care of. 

Getting too many spam messages through a website contact form can be very irritating. It requires a lot of time to handle as well. They can also make you miss important emails from clients which in turn is not good for your business. Hence, it becomes crucial to find out the ways to protect a WordPress website from annoying contact form spams.

Luckily a number of automated ways are available to block contact form spam in WordPress websites. 

This article is focused on revealing the different ways to diminish and stop contact form spam in WordPress. 

What is Contact Form Spam?

Form spam occurs when wicked entities or back players reveal undesired information through online forms to perform a cybercrime or transmit wrong messages.

In more simplistic terms, form spam takes place when unwanted or bad messages find out their way by making use of your website’s forms and you are not even aware of it. This may end up diminishing your brand’s reputation if the spammy messages are displayed on the front-end of your website and the visitors are able to see them. This can introduce hazardous consequences to your business. 

The Necessity To Prevent Contact Form Spams in Your WordPress Website

Contact form spam is normally automated. The issue is associated even with little and less popular websites as it is achieved with the help of “bots” that automatically dispatches spam.

The spambots move slowly through the websites with an aim to find out the forms that are not shielded properly with adequate security measures, so they can fill the inboxes of the people with spammy links.

They can also attempt to destroy your login form by making use of brute force attacks, which is one of the important reasons behind adopting adequate security measures for making a WordPress website well protected. 

Spam is not a trivial problem. This can prove to be extremely hazardous to your website, and your fame if not handled properly. 

How To Prevent A Contact Form Spam From Your WordPress Website

Contact form spams can be prevented on a WordPress website in a number of ways. 

The details can be seen as under

Selecting the correct plugin to fight contact form spam

A number of WordPress contact form plugins do not contain the adequate security measures to guard themselves from spam and the plugins that come with appropriate spam protection features are not that reliable and comfortable to use. Hence, picking the best WordPress contact form plugins becomes essential. One of the best available options to fulfill the purpose is making use of the WPForms plugin as it provides a built-in ‘honeypot’ spam protection. It also offers a built-in reCAPTCHA functionality that enables you to combat spams. 

Utilizing reCaptcha checkboxes to prevent contact form spam

Another important way to block the spambots is to make use of ReCAPTCHA which is a free tool introduced by Google and can be used in conjunction with WPForm’s built-in honeypot system. 

Utilizing Google invisible reCaptcha to block contact form spam

Some website owners do not prefer to ask their users to check a box in order to submit the contact form successfully. Google’s invisible reCAPTCHA can be utilized in such situations. It is identical to a regular reCAPTCHA in its working but does not hold any checkbox. Google itself decides whether the one who is submitting the form can be a bot or no and if so, it proceeds with added reCAPTCHA verification.

Utilizing custom captcha to prevent contact form spam

Many website owners do not prefer to make use of Google’s reCAPTCHA because of the privacy matters hence they opt for something that is not branded. The option that is available for such circumstances is making use of custom CAPTCHA addon that is a division of pro plugin.

Blocking spam bots from viewing the contact form

You can also opt for preventing the bots from seeing the contact form in order to prevent contact form spam. You can choose to go with a password protection method or can display the contact form exclusively to the registered users of your WordPress membership site. 

Asking questions

Another technique to block contact form spam is building a form field to ask a question to the site visitor and the site visitor has to answer the question accurately in order to proceed. The question can be either a text question or a math question and it has to be answered correctly by the visitor to accomplish successful form submission. For example, you can add a simple mathematical addition question like 5+5 =? and the answer has to be given by the one trying to submit the form.

Final Words

Contact form spams can harm you and your business in a number of ways. They can prove to be very dangerous and can completely destroy your reputation in the market. Hence, blocking these spams in your WordPress website becomes mandatory. However, no perfect solution is available to completely eliminate form spam on your website, the above tips can aid to deal with the situation to a great extent. Hope you will find these tips helpful and will be able to prevent spams on your WordPress site significantly.

If you are looking for further assistance to enhance the security of your WordPress website and protect it from irritating contact form spam, you can contact us anytime. We are always happy to help!