Spam content can arrive in your inbox through your website contact form. This is extremely common and highly inconvenient. Spam uses up your storage space, clutters your inbox, and can lead to missing out on important emails.

You need to take steps to prevent your contact form from accepting spam messages. Besides the problems mentioned above, spambots can cause real harm to your business. Bots send spam messages in an attempt to exploit your email list.

There are a few helpful ways to prevent your contact forms from accepting spam messages. Your best option is to use a great WordPress contact form plugin.

A contact form plugin will include features that will stop spam from coming through your contact form. So, let’s look at a few different ways that you can reduce contact form spam in WordPress.

1. Add reCAPTCHA

CAPTCHA is a verification tool where users are asked to type out letters and numbers from an image. reCAPTCHA is a newer and free version by Google that prevents bots from sending emails to you automatically.

It works by asking users to simply check a button to identify themselves as being human. Using reCAPTCHA takes less time than a CAPTCHA tool, which increases the likelihood of completed form submissions.

If you’re familiar with HTML and server-side processing, then you can add reCAPTCHA to your contact form manually. You’ll need to have access to a site key and a secret key that you can generate from Google’s reCAPTCHA setup page.

An easier way to add reCAPTCHA is to use a WordPress plugin like WPForms. A plugin like this will help you build forms and make it easy to add security features to your contact forms. Just like in the manual method, you need to have the secret key and a site key from Google and then, WPForms will make the rest super simple.

With basically one click of a button, you can add reCAPTCHA to your online forms.

You can also use invisible reCAPTCHA.

Invisible reCAPTCHA works by analyzing the activity on a website. It tracks movements, clicks, and other activities to determine whether the user is a human or a bot. It only invokes the reCAPTCHA action if the user appears to be suspicious.

You can opt to add invisible reCAPTCHA manually or with the help of a contact form plugin like WPForms.

2. Create a Custom Captcha

Another way to secure your contact forms is to use WPForms to create a custom CAPTCHA. A custom CAPTCHA can take the form of a math question or a question where people have to type in a reply.

This is an interactive way to secure your contact form and ensure that the user isn’t a bot. Users prove that they are human by providing answers to simple questions. These challenges change whenever a page is refreshed and creates certainty that only real people are sending messages to you.

3. Enable Double Opt-in

You can also make your form submissions more secure by using a double opt-in strategy. The first time users register to your website or sign up for your email newsletter, they’re sent an email with a confirmation link.

Users need to click on the link in the confirmation email to confirm that they have agreed to become a member on your website. This serves two important purposes. One, it helps you detect fake users. If the confirmation link is not clicked on, then it’s highly likely that the user is a fake.

Two, you ensure that your WordPress website is GDPR-ready and getting explicit consent to send emails to a person. It is critical for businesses to make their WordPress websites GDPR compliant. The GDPR regulation aims to improve users’ privacy and imposes a hefty fine to businesses that fail to comply.

Use a contact form plugin that has integrations with email providers who provide double opt-in features.

4. Use a Honeypot

One of the issues with using a CAPTCHA or reCAPTCHA tool is that users can get frustrated with them. If users feel like filling a contact form is inconvenient, it can lead to decreased form submission rates. You can overcome this by creating a honeypot field for bots.

A honeypot field is an invisible field in your contact form. Humans can’t see it but a bot will detect this field and fill it up automatically. Your form invalidates any submissions where the honeypot field is filled and prevents spam from going through.

Using a honeypot strategy removes the need for your users to actively prove that they are human. It’s more convenient for your audience and keeps your contact forms secure.

Adopt the Right WordPress Form Plugin to Protect Your Inbox

We’ve looked at the key ways you can prevent contact form spam in WordPress. You can use Google’s reCAPTCHA or a custom CAPTCHA, add a honeypot field, or enable double opt-ins.

Take your users’ convenience and your own preferences into consideration when choosing a means to prevent your contact forms from being abused.

Overall, creating a spam-free inbox is easy when you have the right tools in place. Many contact form plugins have in-built features that will help protect your inbox from spammy content. One of the best tools available is WPForms which allows anyone to create great-looking contact forms without any coding knowledge and stop contact form spam at the same time.

Wrapping Up

Now that you know how to reduce contact form spam, you can focus on what matters: taking care of your customers and generating leads. If you liked our article then you might like to read our other informative articles here:

• Best Chrome Extensions for WordPress
• Best WordPress CDN Services Providers

The post How to Reduce Contact Form Spam in WordPress appeared first on MYSTERY THEMES.

In order to secure your WordPress site, there are a few things that you can use, it will also help you to update your website regularly. Obviously, security is one of the major concerns when it comes to running a WordPress site.

Being an owner of WordPress website, it is your duty to defend your site from the hackers and other several security attacks.

Whether you are a beginner or an experienced programmer or developer, just make sure that you use the best security practices to save your sites against hackers. You should install the best security tools and plugins offered by WordPress for the tight security of your website.

On other hands, WordPress gives you some of the best security tips that will keep your site safe and healthy.

Have a look at some of the best practices that every WordPress site owner should consider while optimizing their site.

1.Secure Login Page – Use 2 Factor Authentication

Whenever you use the 2-factor authentication for the login page is the good security measure.

In this case, the user caters login details for two different elements. The website owner decides what those two are. It can be a common password followed by a secret question or a set of characters.

2. Use Of Email As Login Id

Generally, you have to input your username to log in. Using an email ID instead of a username is a more secure approach.

However, user-names are easy to predict, while email IDs are not easy to guess. Likewise, most of the WordPress user account is generated with a unique email address to make it a valid identifier to log in.

To get complete security, you can always take help from the WordPress email login plugins. As they work incredible and it starts working right after the activation because it does not require any configuration.

3. Change The Login URL

Changing login URL is one of the best ways to secure your WordPress website. However, there are many other ways to secure your website from the hackers. As changing of default user URL may stop fake login pages.

However, when hackers know the original URL of your login page, they may try to attack your website.

4. Play With Your Password

Changing the website password is one of the healthy ways to save your website from hackers. You can play with the website’s passwords and change them frequently. You can also Improve password capability by adding an extra uppercase and lowercase letters, special characters, and numbers.

It is advisable to take help from premium password management services such as LastPass that offers a proprietary password management service. They store encrypted passwords in private accounts.

They will not only generate safe passwords for you but also store them inside a browser add-on that is hassle-free exercise to save website password.

5. Add User Account With Care

When you have a WordPress blog or multi-author blogs, you need to deal with multiple people to access your admin panel of the website. This process could jeopardize your website’s security.

For a strong password, you must use a plugin that available in the market, they help to stop multiple logins. Or for multiple logins, they will use their precautionary measures to secure your website.

6. Change The Main Admin User Name

When you use WordPress for the first time, you should never choose admin as a username for your main administrator account.

As hackers can easily guess the username and password are very easy to approachable afterward.

In the market, there are such plugins available. Those can stop such attempts wisely. They can immediately ban fake login and track IP address from someone trying to do fake login.

7. Take back up of your site regularly

No matter you have secured website from high-security management service, there is always space for modifications.

When you have a backup of your website content, you can always restore your content on the WordPress website. To make this professional, you should take help from some plugins that can help you in this project.

Conclusion

Being a beginner or a fresher to WordPress website creation, they are a lot to take care of. By considering this piece of writing you can enrich your WordPress knowledge. As everything that mentioned in this article is a step in the right direction.

The more you care about your WordPress site security and safety, it will be harder to break security for hackers.

However, it’s true fact that whenever your website is hacked, you will spend more hours or days to fix it. Sometimes you may lose your all data permanently. To stop this, always take an expert help.

If you are looking for a professional help, it is better to hire a professional WordPress developer such as Kodematix. They are a creative web development and digital marketing agency with tons of experience. They also create best open source website solutions as per your business requirements.

Author Bio:

Daniel Clark is the marketing strategist at “Kodematix, expert WordPress developer” company. He really likes to shares his views and knowledge about Website marketing as here in this post he acknowledges us some of the best methods to be implemented on the website to make it more trustworthy.

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