We host a wide array of websites that are completely different from one another yet there is one thing connects them all.
Spam.
In September 2019, spam accounted for 54.68% of all email traffic.
Whether it’s unwanted emails sent directly to our clients’ email addresses or unsolicited contact form submissions – they’re all the same.
We don’t want them, our customers don’t want them and they are a complete waste of everyone’s time.
Now and then, we see a rise in spam to each of our clients contact forms.
It’s almost as if these bots or human spammers think their tactics will work.
Luckily, we have a great solution if you are using WordPress that will block spammers, bots and outreach emails from “SEO’s” and “web designers” looking to poach your clients.
This solution will help you stop contact form spam if you are using Caldera Forms.
The Basic Steps To Blocking Contact Form Spam
We’re only recommending free plugins.
Honestly, we looked at paid options to stopping WordPress contact form spam but we could not justify even mentioning them when there are free alternatives to hand.
1) Set Up A Honeypot
Bots are designed to read a form, fill out required fields and submit it’s content to you.
A honeypot is a hidden field that a bot will complete not knowing it is hidden and should be ignored.
Once it tries to submit the form it will not send.
Bots could be trained to read CSS and JS to look out for honeypot fields so this is a very basic step in spam prevention.
2)Contact Form Recaptcha Fields
Recaptcha is a great way to prevent spammers.
V2 and V3 of Google’s Recaptcha is quite groundbreaking technology.
Unfortunately, this is never a 100% proof method.
Captcha Farmers get paid to break or pass Recaptcha fields and human spammers or marketers will pass a bot test if they wanted to send you an email.
3) Contact Form Pagination
We host some huge websites. Some have tens of thousands of products that generate millions of visitors per month.
As you can imagine, the high volume of spam that comes through the form is infuriating.
We reduced the amount of spam with one simple trick.
We gave their customers the option to choose two options. Call us or submit a form.
Either a contact form or their telephone number would then be presented depending on what they chose.
This reduced bot spam by around 60%. Unfortunately pagination can be manipulated if the bot has been trained correctly so some still trickle through.
Blocking Spam Being Sent Within A Contact Form On WordPress
Caldera Forms offers a lot but spam protection isn’t one of them.
To eliminate the majority of spam submissions you will simply need to set up a processor.
This is the best way to stopping Caldera Forms spam.
We’ve tried and tested many other plugins and methods but none were as successful as this method.
This technique has eradicated unwanted form submissions for every one of our clients.
It’s so effective we have actually stopped using the basic techniques because of it’s success rate.
So here’s exactly how to prevent spam form submissions with Caldera Forms….
Completely Block Spam Messages Using Processors
For this step to work, you just need to create a Form Processor.
Step 1
Open the form you want to protect and click on Processors >>> Add Processor
Step 2
For this to work, you’ll need to then set up a Conditional Recipient by clicking Use Processor.
Step 3
The next step tells the form processor where to send the spam email.
We use a spam inbox that deletes incoming emails automatically but you can put whatever email address you want down.
Make sure to select/check Remove Default or it will still send to your client.
Step 4
The final step tells Caldera Forms what keywords should trigger the processor.
Just click Conditions and then Add Conditional Group.
You will then need to select a field from the dropdown for the processor to check.
Take a look at your existing spam submissions to find keywords you want to lookout for and away you go.
You can add an unlimited amount of keywords and we see this as the best solution to spam submission on Caldera Forms.
That’s it!
That’s the exact steps that we took to reduce spam.
Following this method reduces spam rates by up to 99% and takes just minutes to set up.
You can use this method to not only reduce the high amount of spam your clients receive but you’re also stopping them from getting marketers promising them the world and in-turn poaching your clients.
Let us know in the comments how you prevent spam through contact forms.