How to Stop Contact Form 7 Spam on WordPress Websites

No blog, website or web service is complete without contact page, as it is the single and preeminent way by which visitors can reach you with their queries and suggestions. Therefore, nobody likes to get spam spam mail in their inbox, particularly if that spam comes from their own website.

Contact form 7 is WordPress’ most straightforward, viable, brilliant, enact, and popular plugin for adding a contact form to your website. It’s an extraordinary little plugin that is easy to set up, adapt to most any purpose and begin getting emails from your website. Contact form 7 allows users to add, manage and customize multiple contact forms.

However, at present, spamming through contact form is a big issue with WordPress websites. The most popular and high traffic website receives hundreds of spam mail every day. So, it becomes very difficult to find out the genuine messages amongst the spam. Over here, we’ll take a look at how individuals can utilize Contact Form 7’s inbuilt anti-spam measures.

1. CAPTCHA:

CAPTCHAs are difficult to peruse images appeared with letter and numbers that “no one but people” can read and understand. By and large, spammers use “bots” or computer code to fill in your contact form so piece of code can’t read the image.

Developers of Contact Form 7 has formed Really Simple CAPTCHA plugging for adding captchas into your contact form to prevent bots from submitting forms on your WordPress website. In order to enjoy this feature in your contact form, you simply need to download the Simple Captcha Plugin and add a CAPTCHA tag into your Contact Form 7.

However, it’s extremely old methods, so you ought to attempt inbuilt technique of Contact Form 7 to keep your inbox away from spam mail.

2. Quizzes

Adding quizzes tag into your Contact Form 7 is also a powerful way to shield contact form from spam mail. You just need to ask some simple and easy question like “Which is greater, 2 or 8?” Again the “bot” won’t have the capacity to respond the question and will fail to submit a contact form successfully that means you will get only genuine contact form submitted by people.

It’s really simple and easy process to add quiz in to your contact form, you just need to create a quiz tag before submitting contact forms. The format for a quiz answers are “question|answer”. Just be careful, don’t make befuddling and complicated questions people cannot answer it.

3. Minimum Character Count

Most of the spam contact form submits with 2 digit message – generally a number. If you are received spam message with equivalent pattern, then you have chance to block them by setting minimum to maximum character limit for message. General users understand everything, if you set this feature in your contact form, then they will submit mail at least with required minimum characters so you will effortlessly blocks bot without baffling genuine users.

4. Akismet

If you are acquainted with WordPress comments, then you have definitely received huge torrent of spam. No more now, in light of the fact Akismet is a cloud-based anti-spam system which is already available in Contact form 7. It is constantly learning what spam is and applying that to assisting you prevent spam on your website. Using Jetpack Plugin with the active Akismet Plugin, you can automatically check form submissions and find out spam submission very easily.

No tricky and lengthy process to empower Akismet, you just need to open your plugins page and activate it. It comes installed by default, but if you removed it, downloads it again from WordPress. Also get an API key and enter it under Plug-in > Akismet. This process is a somewhat more complicated because you need to follow the documentation to complete it.

5. The Honeypot

This is an innovative and executioner solution to prevent spam message. It provides an irresistible trap for the bots. It allows developers to add hidden field in to their contact form which people won’t see, and disregard. Bots are dumb and they will attempt to fill in all of the form fields with their junk, so Honeypot plugin catches them red-handed.

In order to get advantages of it, download and installed it to your webpage and then add a honeypot field to each of your forms.

6. Bad Behavior

Bad Behavior Plugin works as a general gatekeeper or spam checker which uses advanced techniques to block spammers from your WordPress website. Today thousand of large and small site trust on PHP-based Bad Behavior to help reduce incoming link spam and malicious activity. By combining it with existing spam prevention services, you can increase their effectiveness and efficiency. It fights spam more extensively to stop spammers from reaching your contact form.

Installing and configuring Bad Behavior on most platforms is truly straightforward and takes just a couple of minutes. In most cases, it does not require configuration. Simply turn it on and stop worrying about spam!

You can utilize Quizzes, or CAPTCHA, or other methods for spam protection. Try any of these and share your experience with us.