How to Stop Contact Form Spam

If you have a website, you are probably getting several spammy messages through its contact form every day. It is a very frustrating issue, because it makes you waste a lot of time.

People have been trying to fight spam for decades, but the problem continues to affect billions of people in the entire world. However, if you have a WordPress-based site, I have got some good news for you: there are several plugins that will help you get rid of spam.

WPForms is a great example. It allows people to build contact forms, payment forms, registration forms, surveys, newsletters, and has over 100 predefined templates. So, if you have been using Contact Form 7 or a similar plugin until now and you want to create better forms for your website, it may be time for an upgrade.

WPForms is mobile-friendly, has a drag-and-drop form builder, instant form notifications, and it is easy to use on any WP site. I recommend it to all my clients because it includes a remarkably effective honeypot feature. Basically, the plugin creates an invisible form field, which can only be detected by the spammers' bots. When those evil bots try to fill in the invisible form field, the plugin will know that they aren't humans, so it will block them right away.

While many plugins incorporate a standard reCAPTCHA form protection mechanism, WPForms also includes a built-in captcha add-on, which will only allow contact form submissions to go through after the visitor has solved a simple random math question, such as "9 + 3 = ?". You can also add your own questions and answers to the captcha add-on, if you prefer to do that.

Now don't get me wrong; I like the Contact Form 7 plugin as well. People who don't want to create complex contact forms should be more than happy with this free plugin. Fortunately, CF 7 incorporates several effective anti-spam features as well. Let us explore them all.

If you ask me, quizzes are much better than math exercises, because they will ask visitors simple questions such as "which is smaller, 2 or 3?". While some bots may be able to figure out the answers to simple math exercises such as 9 + 3, it is much harder for them to understand if they have to choose an option from a list, click a certain button, etc. The good news is that Contact Form 7 can use user-defined quizzes to stop spammers.

Akismet is known to be amongst the most effective anti-spam plugins; that's why it is often included with all WordPress installations by default. If you are a business user, you will need to pay $5/month for a site, but you shouldn't forget that this plugin is much more than a spam blocker plugin. More than this, if you run a personal, non-commercial site, you can get the Akismet API key for free.

If you like WPForms' honeypot feature, you will love the one that has been built into CF 7. Activating this feature is as easy as generating a shortcode, and then inserting it into your form. From now on, people who use bots to send you unsolicited messages will have a hard time trying to do that.

Contact Form 7 can also use captcha to stop spammers in their tracks. You will need to use the Really Simple CAPTCHA plugin for this, but don't worry: it was built by the same generous developer who has created CF 7 itself, so it will work great in conjunction with it. To use it, install the plugin, activate it, and then insert the captcha shortcode in the script that is used for your form.