How To Protect Your Website Contact Page From Spam

Your contact page plays a crucial role in encouraging potential customers to get in touch, but it is also more prone to spamming.

So before you know it, your email inbox can be filled with spam messages.

Fortunately, there are plenty of ways you can protect your contact page from spamming. In this article, we discuss what contact form spam is, why it is not good for your website, and how to prevent it.

Let’s get started!

What is contact page spam?

Before we delve into how you can protect your contact page from spam, let’s first understand what contact page spams are and why they are not good for your business.

Spambots are basically automated computer programs that are designed to submit false information to your email signup form or contact page.

Spammers tend to look for ways they can take over your server, site, or even email address so that they can use them to send out spam emails. In worse scenarios, they can steal your email list so that they can easily have new people to spam.

Other than spambots, there are human spammers too. These are people who search the internet and then copy and paste their harmful content into your contact pages.

There is no doubt that contact page spam can be very annoying. The worst thing is that it can affect any website, regardless of its size. Contact page spam is also dangerous.

Why contact page spam is dangerous?

You are probably wondering if contact page spam can pose any danger to your business. The truth is that contact page spam can be very dangerous.

Here is how:

Overview:

1. It can make your site more prone to hacking

Automated spambots can target your site’s page with user registration and login forms with the aim of hacking. This can be very dangerous for your business because it can lead to information leaks, account takeover, and loss of data. This can cost your business a significant amount of money and time to fix.

2. Denial of Service [DoS]

Some spambots can repeatedly fill your contact pages to their limit. The DoS bot’s aim is to overwhelm your site with numerous requests made within a short period. This may slow down your website speed, affect the contact page functionality for real users, and in a worse scenario, can lead to your site outage.

3. Submit harmful links

Spambots and human spammers with bad intentions can use your contact page to submit links that contain malware. If any of your team clicks the link, the malware can end up infecting your whole website.

4. Productivity reduction

If your employees have to constantly filter through numerous spam entries, it can affect their ability to respond to real people [potential customers] promptly.

Low productivity can damage your company’s reputation as well as make you lose potential customers.

Related: What Do Website Analytics Allow You To Do?

How to protect your contact page from spam

Now that you have a better understanding of what contact page spam is all about and how it can affect your business, let’s see how you can protect your contact page from spam.

Here are measures you can take to protect your contact page from spam:

Overview:

1. Use ReCAPTCHA

One of the most effective ways to protect your contact page from spam is by using ReCAPTCHA v3. This is a free tool available from Google. You need to add some code that you generate through this tool to your site. 

This tool can significantly reduce contact page spam on your website, and it really works well. Just like invisible ReCAPTCHA v2, ReCAPTCHA v3 also works silently in the background analyzing user behavior to identify and block spambots.

2. Use the Honeypot Antispam Method

This is also another perfect way to protect your contact pages from spam. A honeypot is basically a bit of code that is invisible to humans but visible to spambots because bots are drawn to them and they can’t stop themselves from trying it out.

They will be filling it out thinking that is a valid page. But your page understands that this particular field is the honeypot and will reject any submissions made from it.

3. Block spammy IP addresses

Another way you can protect your contact page from spam is by blacklisting spammy IP addresses. This approach may not seem as efficient as those methods listed above because it is petty much easier to take on an IP address using VPN and proxies services.

However, if you see a pattern of similar IP addresses attacking your site repeatedly with spam, you can simply blacklist the IPs from accessing your site. This is definitely a perfect way to block human spammers that have slipped through your ReCAPTCHA.

4. Add a unique quiz or comment field

Another incredible way to protect your contact page from spam is by adding a mandatory field where people can answer a random question. Of course, this can also go a long way in reducing bots. However, it may not effectively stop human spammers.

5. Let new users verify their emails

Spambots and human spammers tend to use fake emails to try and sign up to your website [if, in any case, you allow users to register].

One of the best ways you can discourage spammers from signing with fake emails is by requiring email verification. This can discourage them because don’t have the patience to verify their emails.

When you add email verification on your website, whenever a user tries to register their account on your website, they will have to provide a valid email address to receive a registration link. This will keep away spammers with fake emails.

Final thoughts

Contact page spam is a common issue that many website owners have to deal with. So you need to find ways to protect your contact page from spam while maintaining an excellent user experience. The above methods are effective and will help you protect your contact page from spammers, thereby keeping it safe.

Additionals:

• 3 Things To Consider Before Selling A Website