Spam is a huge issue with contact forms on WordPress websites - both the websites we design, and on a global scale. As the most popular free WordPress contact form plugin, Contact Form 7 is highly targeted by spammers. Spam contact form submissions can be a huge issue for WordPress websites with high traffic, receiving hundreds of spam emails each day. These are inconvenient and make it difficult to spot the genuine messages amongst the spam.
Comments can be a huge asset to your blog, and there are some fantastic plugins available to enhance the comments facility built into WordPress itself. Our friends at SoftwareFindr spent time researching the best WordPress form builders out there, it's a comprehensive roundup and well worth a read. However, no matter how good your comment form is, spam comments can make you want to disable comments on your blog completely, which would be a shame.
For example, one of our WordPress web design clients complained about the amount of spam they were receiving through their Contact Form 7 contact form. We tested a range of methods to find the best solution, which I will share with you now. And the best thing is, you don't need to be a WordPress expert to use them. You can also have a look at Classified WordPress themes, which would be a great option for building your WordPress website.
Should I use all the anti-spam methods you recommend?
In a word, no. I do NOT recommend that you implement all of the methods suggested in this article. A WordPress website should be kept as clean and minimal as possible behind the scenes, and you should not install unnecessary plugins. Instead, I recommend using trial and error to experiment with these solutions - whether you're a WordPress expert or a novice. Track how much contact form spam you receive after implementing one or two methods, and make changes until you are happy. Install Akismet as a starting point, and take it from there.
Using Contact Form 7's in-built anti-spam measures
You'll find a lot of articles recommending CAPTCHA and quiz plugins that work with Contact Form 7. Most of these are unnecessary as it's better to use the features already built into the Contact Form 7 WordPress plugin.
Quiz
Simple quizzes are becoming a popular way to combat contact form spam. They work by asking the user a simple question such as "Which is bigger, 2 or 8?" Bots can't answer this question. As a result, only people who enter the correct response can submit the contact form.
To add a quiz, edit your contact form and click the Generate Tag dropdown. Paste the shortcode that appears below into your contact form. It will look something like this:
[quiz capital-quiz "Which is bigger, 2 or 8?|8"]
2. Minimum character count
The WordPress website featured in this article received a lot of spam contact forms with 2-digit messages - usually a number. I have no idea what they were trying to achieve, but it's obviously a popular type of spam at the moment.
If all your spam messages follow an obvious pattern, you can block them by setting up your contact form to block messages that meet this pattern. In this case, I used the Max and Min Length options in Contact Form 7 to require messages to be more than 20 characters long. Genuine enquiries will usually provide more than 20 characters, so this blocks bots without frustrating real users.
The Message/Comments field will look something like this:
Akismet has a reputation as the best WordPress anti-spam plugin. Not everyone knows that it works with Contact Form 7 as well as blog comments.
Once you have activated the Akismet WordPress plugin and followed the on-screen instructions to add your API key (free for non-profit-making website, small monthly fee for business sites), you need to do a bit of extra config to make it talk to Contact Form 7 - see https://contactform7.com/spam-filtering-with-akismet/.
In my tests, Akismet stopped about 70% of the Contact Form 7 spam but not all of it. It worked well in conjunction with some of the other solutions mentioned in this article.
Contact Form 7 Honeypot is a WordPress plugin that adds a hidden field to your contact form. Real users won't complete it because the field is invisible. However bots won't know this and will fill it in. This allows the plugin to recognise them as bots and block their submission.
After you have installed and activated the Contact Form 7 Honeypot WordPress plugin, use the Generate Tag option to create a honeypot shortcode to insert into your contact form. It will look something like this (Contact Form 7 recommend changing the ID to something unique, so replace 827 with something else):
The Really Simple CAPTCHA WordPress plugin was created by the developer of Contact Form 7 so they work together seamlessly. The plugin allows you to add a CAPTCHA to your contact form. It's designed to prevent bots from submitting forms on your WordPress website.
Once you have installed and activated Really Simple CAPTCHA, insert a CAPTCHA tag into your Contact Form 7 form. (Click the Generate Tag dropdown to see the available options and create a customized tag to paste into your form.) It will look something like this:
Please note that CAPTCHAs are becoming slightly old fashioned and are not great for user-experience. They also require particular features to be enabled on your server, which may not be in place for your WordPress website.
I would recommend adding a quiz first (see above), and only trying CAPTCHA if this doesn't work. The two methods basically do the same thing. They prevent automated bots from submitting your website contact form - so you shouldn't need both.
All WordPress websites receive spam in slightly different ways. What works for one website may not work for another.
When I had to stop Contact Form 7 spam on a WordPress website, I immediately achieved a huge reduction in spam simply by installing Akismet. The spam messages reduced from dozens per day to 5-10.
I fixed the problem completely by combining Akismet with the Contact Form 7 Honeypot plugin, a quiz and minimum character count.
If you just want to add one method to reduce Contact Form 7 spam, then I recommend Akismet. This is the best standalone solution as it's so powerful and comprehensive. You can use it whether you're a WordPress expert or a beginner. It can make a real difference to your WordPress contact form spam.
3 years later, this info is still helpful in building my anti-spam arsenal. Thank you Katie.
Wow! - Thank you... Honeypot worked for us. We have many clients and all of them are using the same Contact Form 7 set-up. But our roofing client was getting hammered with spam - like 7 to 20 per day and it was driving us + him crazy. - thanks again.
Hi Katie,
I just set up the quiz and honeypot as suggested on my website. Hope this works. Thanks for sharing your experience and solutions with us.
How about blocking specific email addresses? I get quiet a few spam enquiries from...
Can I ask if this article is still working for you? I get a lot of spam on my contact form. I've installed Honeypot and my spam count went down. Most of the spam is blank. Some times there is an email address and a name but most of the time there is nothing. Do your other tips like minimum character and others still work?
Hi Fred, yes these techniques are still working on our clients' sites. You shouldn't be able to submit a comment that is blank with no email address - try making these fields required to prevent blank forms from being submitted.
Hi there I just recently rebuilt my site and I noticed I had so much spam coming in through my contact form7. I'll try the techniques above very soon.
I use Contact Form 7 with a simple math quiz, min and max length on text fields, and min and max values for number fields, and premium plugin Anti-Spam by CleanTalk.
Hello, my website had got hacked I deleted everything and restore my backup. But now I am getting spam leads through contact form 7. I am thinking to fixed the problem by combining Akismet with the Contact Form 7 just like you did. Hope it will work for me
Didn't see it mentioned but to enhance honeypot, add two or three to your contact form and make sure you edit the title of them to phone, email, address or some such attractive heading. (attractive to bots)
Awesome tips on preventing spam - thanks!
Our website was receiving 100s of spams before. Great info. Thanks!
my problem is people are writing wrong email ids ..so i have auto response enabled..
so when people complete and send a submission with something@gmial.com its a spelling mistake and it bounces
Problem is my site gets lot of traffic and i get 300-400 bounces a day !!
My head hurts with frustration\
what do I do ?? i also think many people deliberately do that also
any solutions to mails from gemail and mial etc ??
Hi,
You could use a no-reply address for your autoresponder emails. That way you can ignore or delete anything sent to that address (including the bounce emails) without cluttering up your inbox. You might also be able to set up a filter to delete them.
Hi Katie,
I'm a novice to WP, so I hope I explain this well.
I noticed that when my customers send me a message through contact form it ends up in my spam file.
Is there anyway to fix that?
Thanks for the article!
Hi Martijn, this is probably because you're using the built-in PHP Mail to send the emails from your website, which is often spammed. Try setting up an SMTP plugin or Mailgun, and this will improve deliverability. You could also try whitelisting the address that your contact forms are sent from.
Hi there Katie. I have a question. Before Few days My hosting Provider Namecheap has blocked one of my blogs and the reason is bombarding of emails on my email address to their server. So is it possible because of contact form 7 spamming?
Hi Josh, do you publish your email address directly on your website? It's most likely that this could be the culprit, although it's definitely worth adding anti-spam measures to your Contact Form 7 enquiry forms in case people are bombarding this. It's very poor of Namecheap to block your blog because of this - a good hosting company like SiteGround or WP Engine would work with you to fix the problem instead of taking such drastic action!
This is great advice. Honeypot and Akismet significantly reduced spam across all of our client accounts. Thanks!
I use Contact Form 7 Honeypot, this very easy to use
hmm ... I recive so many Spam email but not from contact from, it's directly. may be I must stop show my Email on public
Hi, if your email address is published on your website then you will get spam emails that way. You can use a plugin such as Email Address Encoder to stop bots from automatically harvesting your address, but the only way to stop people from manually using it for spam purposes is to remove it from your website and just use the contact form. I find that about half of our enquiries come directly via email and half use the contact form, so we have never removed ours and just accept that there will be some spam.
I used to get a lot of spam sent through my lead forms but now I use uCalc https://ucalc.pro/en for lead forms on my website. They have no captcha but still no spam at all - that must be some kind of a special protection there.
I would honestly think that if you just put a post limit and content limit on new accounts 5-10 posts, before they get approved and move forward. This would prevent the influx of spam for a set number of accounts, as it seems lately its not so a influx in number of accounts used to spam but just a couple account used to spam repeatedly for every 15m for 10-20 hours at a time.
Also on the front of allowing the community to help moderate some, to relieve some of the stress on Will, Norm, and staff (cause we all know Joeys to busy prepping/editing awesome videos for us). Would it be possible to add a first line approval flagging for these members with a select set of forum users/mods. Instead of it outright banning/removal of posts have them enter a moderation queue, until official tested staff/mods can make a final decision. This would make things easier from a management point of view in that it should allow you to spend less time looking for groups of posts and users that are potentially questionable and just quickly check and then clear either approve or deny actions.
You could also add something for when a user enters moderation for being flagged that if they are a new account, all previous posts go into a semi non visible state, where you to the bulk of viewers public or private, there posts are hidden by default, but not deleted. At least not deleted until a moderation decision is made by tested staff.
some of these ideas probably are not quick to implement but have a high probability of improving the forum experience for everyone. While not ostracizing new users that we want and deserve to be here.
Can i create a section on here that humans can not see but spam bots automatically fill out? Is this available
Hi Cory, that is what the Contact Form 7 honeypot does.
You really gave me an idea on how to make my contact form spamless, let me try one of those plug-ins idea thanku for sharing this article
Excellent article! This is really helpful to used my business site development.
Thanks.
Happy to read this. Found very informative for me and all who read this.
I really appreciate your sharing this best article.
I've deleted contact form 7 because the amount of spam was ridiculous, even after trying several of the suggestions above. I am STILL getting spam, even though it's deleted. Any advice?
If you're still getting spam after deleting Contact Form 7 then I expect it's a different type of spam. Are you getting spam comments instead of contact form submissions?
I tried Akismet with Contact form 7 but this is not working for me. I also used Captcha but this also not works for me. Any other suggestions?
Hi Rahul, have you tried the Contact Form 7 honeypot plugin? If none of the suggestions work then it may be that your 'spam' messages are coming from real people rather than bots. It's annoying but if the messages are being sent manually then no anti-spam measures will stop them.
Hey there,
Thanks for your nice article on how to make a site spam free. Hope users will get help from your awesome write-up.
Good day! Do you know if they make any plugins to safeguard against hackers? I'm kinda paranoid about losing everything I've worked hard on. Any recommendations?
Hello Smithe981,
First and foremost we suggest using .htaccess files (for Apache Web Servers) or NGINX config to block access to sensitive files (readme.html, licence.txt etc) and return a 404 error. Secondly we would recommend that all folders (and sub-folders) are setup with 755 permissions and files are set to 644. If you want to protect things further we would suggest changing wp-config,php to 600,
More on file permissions: https://codex.wordpress.org/Changing_File_Permissions
Make regular backups of your content - we use Updraft Backup but there are others out there. Be warned that scheduled tasks for backups will only run if someone visits your website. For each visit WordPress checks the status of scheduled tasks and runs them but only if someone has visited the website. We would recommend your web hosting provider sets up a scheduled server task that makes a request to your website to force WordPress to check for scheduled tasks automatically.
We provide website hosting with a really cool backup feature. Your website is securely backed up to a second server (files and database) every day. If something happens to the primary server that prevents your website being shown then the backup server will take over.
Don't install loads of plugins on your website as you don't know how proficient the developers are in PHP (the programming language) or WordPress best practices. By reducing the number of plugins you can often avoid problems. Keeping your website up to date with the latest plugins and updates is essential but make sure the plugins are compatible with the latest version of the website. Before updating websites we do a backup so we can revert a plugin should an update cause problems.
I hope this answers your question - please let us know if you would like us to do a security audit of your website or help you with website hosting moving forwards.
If your hosting company has good backups then there's no chance you will lose everything you've worked hard on. We use WP Engine which does daily backups with easy one-click restores. I think people get carried away with security plugins etc. and by following some simple best practices, you can keep your WordPress website secure without weighing it down with major security plugins. See my post about this here.
thanks for sharing I have added the simple maths line to all my clients contact forms
Brilliant, I hope this helps to reduce spam for your clients.
Ksatie i have used this for myself and it has helped reduce my spam. Thankyou!
We've released the Magic Tooltips for Contact Form 7 plugin.
You can add tooltips to your Contact Form 7 Forms easily and quickly.
Our Contact Form 7 tooltips plugin comes with a Tooltip Style Generator to make styling your tooltips easy.
Thanks for letting me know, I'll check it out. Tooltips sound like a good way to add explanatory information about contact forms without cluttering up the page in the way that other notes do.
I have been getting a lot of blank spam mails from the contact form lately and I needed this one :)
Thank you Katie!
PS: I am a first timer on this blog. I usually don't get Co.UK results on my search since I belong in India :)
Thanks for this...extremely helpful.
We also use the "Really Simple CAPTCHA" plugin for spam protection on Contact Form 7, but a very good and interesting article if you're looking an alternative.
Yes that works. I think it's nice to try to find alternatives to CAPTCHA where possible, ideally ones that don't impact on user-experience. But Really Simple CAPTCHA is a good plugin and we have used it before.
Superb post. Never knew this, appreciate it for letting me know.
Very grateful for this clearly written information! Thanks.
Hi Katie,
Thanks for sharing.
Is there a way to disable copy/paste option in the text area? So that we can block marketers from pasting their content and sending to us.
And also is there a way to block particular words to be sent?
Thank you.
Hi Vijay, yes Contact Form 7 has an option to block specific words - see https://contactform7.com/comment-blacklist/. There are plugins that disable right clicking on your whole website (not just Contact Form 7) such as WP-CopyProtect which we have used before. Personally I hate these plugins - if people want to copy your content then they will find another way, and this really interferes with user experience as there are lots of valid reasons to right click.
Very nice and wise collection of words to describe the importance of anti-spam plugins.
I am running a video website. And when I started it, the Akismet was already installed. I want to ask is it necessary to install more anti-spam plugins to protect my website. I mean, professionally how many anti-spam plugins should be installed if you want 100% protection.
There's no such thing as 100% protection against spam. My advice is to see how you get on with Akismet. If you're getting little or no spam then don't bulk up your website by adding extra plugins. If you're still getting quite a lot of spam then you may need to try additional anti-spam measures. Use trial and error until you get to a point where you're getting little or no spam, with as few plugins as possible. Don't just add extra plugins for the sake of it.
I am using a similar setup right now for one of my clients. Another thing we are doing is using Disqus for the comment mechanism. That also helps to monitor SPAM as it is moderated. I also started to use Akismet, Honeypot, adding a quiz, and setting a minimum character limit. I can't set a maximum because a lot of people using the contact forms right War and Peace style messages. I am going to make the suggestion to limit that as well.
Thanks for the tips
Thanks for sharing...very helpful article
You really gave me an idea on how to make my contact form spamless, let me try one of those plug-ins :)
Thanks Katie for sharing this. Most of the websites I do are WordPress websites. For spam protection on Contact Form 7 I use "Really Simple CAPTCHA" plugin, its pretty easy to configure. I never used Honeypot, I think it is more easier to configure, I should give it a try.
Thanks again for such useful tips.
Hi Niki, the benefit of a honeypot over CAPTCHA is that is happens in the background without bothering real users who are submitting your form. A lot of people find CAPTCHA frustrating and there's a definite movement away from CAPTCHAS at the moment, however if you're using CAPTCHA then Really Simple CAPTCHA is the best one I'm aware of.
57 Comments
3 years later, this info is still helpful in building my anti-spam arsenal. Thank you Katie.
Wow! - Thank you... Honeypot worked for us. We have many clients and all of them are using the same Contact Form 7 set-up. But our roofing client was getting hammered with spam - like 7 to 20 per day and it was driving us + him crazy. - thanks again.
Hi Katie,
I just set up the quiz and honeypot as suggested on my website. Hope this works. Thanks for sharing your experience and solutions with us.
How about blocking specific email addresses? I get quiet a few spam enquiries from...
*@anything.ru
Yes, you can do this. Please see contactform7.com/comment-blacklist. You can also enter email addresses into the blacklist.
Can I ask if this article is still working for you? I get a lot of spam on my contact form. I've installed Honeypot and my spam count went down. Most of the spam is blank. Some times there is an email address and a name but most of the time there is nothing. Do your other tips like minimum character and others still work?
Hi Fred, yes these techniques are still working on our clients' sites. You shouldn't be able to submit a comment that is blank with no email address - try making these fields required to prevent blank forms from being submitted.
Hi there I just recently rebuilt my site and I noticed I had so much spam coming in through my contact form7. I'll try the techniques above very soon.
I use Contact Form 7 with a simple math quiz, min and max length on text fields, and min and max values for number fields, and premium plugin Anti-Spam by CleanTalk.
Some legitimate users may not know their system is infected with malware and their IP address, email address or domain name is on a spam blacklist. Users can check if they are on a blacklist. I wrote a blog article on this topic at https://abclegaldocs.com/blog-Colorado-Notary/spam-filter-for-wordpress-contact-form/
Hello, my website had got hacked I deleted everything and restore my backup. But now I am getting spam leads through contact form 7. I am thinking to fixed the problem by combining Akismet with the Contact Form 7 just like you did. Hope it will work for me
Didn't see it mentioned but to enhance honeypot, add two or three to your contact form and make sure you edit the title of them to phone, email, address or some such attractive heading. (attractive to bots)
Awesome tips on preventing spam - thanks!
Our website was receiving 100s of spams before. Great info. Thanks!
my problem is people are writing wrong email ids ..so i have auto response enabled..
so when people complete and send a submission with something@gmial.com its a spelling mistake and it bounces
Problem is my site gets lot of traffic and i get 300-400 bounces a day !!
My head hurts with frustration\
what do I do ?? i also think many people deliberately do that also
any solutions to mails from gemail and mial etc ??
Hi,
You could use a no-reply address for your autoresponder emails. That way you can ignore or delete anything sent to that address (including the bounce emails) without cluttering up your inbox. You might also be able to set up a filter to delete them.
Hi Katie,
I'm a novice to WP, so I hope I explain this well.
I noticed that when my customers send me a message through contact form it ends up in my spam file.
Is there anyway to fix that?
Thanks for the article!
Hi Martijn, this is probably because you're using the built-in PHP Mail to send the emails from your website, which is often spammed. Try setting up an SMTP plugin or Mailgun, and this will improve deliverability. You could also try whitelisting the address that your contact forms are sent from.
Hi there Katie. I have a question. Before Few days My hosting Provider Namecheap has blocked one of my blogs and the reason is bombarding of emails on my email address to their server. So is it possible because of contact form 7 spamming?
Hi Josh, do you publish your email address directly on your website? It's most likely that this could be the culprit, although it's definitely worth adding anti-spam measures to your Contact Form 7 enquiry forms in case people are bombarding this. It's very poor of Namecheap to block your blog because of this - a good hosting company like SiteGround or WP Engine would work with you to fix the problem instead of taking such drastic action!
This is great advice. Honeypot and Akismet significantly reduced spam across all of our client accounts. Thanks!
I use Contact Form 7 Honeypot, this very easy to use
hmm ... I recive so many Spam email but not from contact from, it's directly. may be I must stop show my Email on public
Hi, if your email address is published on your website then you will get spam emails that way. You can use a plugin such as Email Address Encoder to stop bots from automatically harvesting your address, but the only way to stop people from manually using it for spam purposes is to remove it from your website and just use the contact form. I find that about half of our enquiries come directly via email and half use the contact form, so we have never removed ours and just accept that there will be some spam.
I used to get a lot of spam sent through my lead forms but now I use uCalc https://ucalc.pro/en for lead forms on my website. They have no captcha but still no spam at all - that must be some kind of a special protection there.
I would honestly think that if you just put a post limit and content limit on new accounts 5-10 posts, before they get approved and move forward. This would prevent the influx of spam for a set number of accounts, as it seems lately its not so a influx in number of accounts used to spam but just a couple account used to spam repeatedly for every 15m for 10-20 hours at a time.
Also on the front of allowing the community to help moderate some, to relieve some of the stress on Will, Norm, and staff (cause we all know Joeys to busy prepping/editing awesome videos for us). Would it be possible to add a first line approval flagging for these members with a select set of forum users/mods. Instead of it outright banning/removal of posts have them enter a moderation queue, until official tested staff/mods can make a final decision. This would make things easier from a management point of view in that it should allow you to spend less time looking for groups of posts and users that are potentially questionable and just quickly check and then clear either approve or deny actions.
You could also add something for when a user enters moderation for being flagged that if they are a new account, all previous posts go into a semi non visible state, where you to the bulk of viewers public or private, there posts are hidden by default, but not deleted. At least not deleted until a moderation decision is made by tested staff.
some of these ideas probably are not quick to implement but have a high probability of improving the forum experience for everyone. While not ostracizing new users that we want and deserve to be here.
Can i create a section on here that humans can not see but spam bots automatically fill out? Is this available
Hi Cory, that is what the Contact Form 7 honeypot does.
You really gave me an idea on how to make my contact form spamless, let me try one of those plug-ins idea thanku for sharing this article
Excellent article! This is really helpful to used my business site development.
Thanks.
Happy to read this. Found very informative for me and all who read this.
I really appreciate your sharing this best article.
I've deleted contact form 7 because the amount of spam was ridiculous, even after trying several of the suggestions above. I am STILL getting spam, even though it's deleted. Any advice?
If you're still getting spam after deleting Contact Form 7 then I expect it's a different type of spam. Are you getting spam comments instead of contact form submissions?
I tried Akismet with Contact form 7 but this is not working for me. I also used Captcha but this also not works for me. Any other suggestions?
Hi Rahul, have you tried the Contact Form 7 honeypot plugin? If none of the suggestions work then it may be that your 'spam' messages are coming from real people rather than bots. It's annoying but if the messages are being sent manually then no anti-spam measures will stop them.
Hey there,
Thanks for your nice article on how to make a site spam free. Hope users will get help from your awesome write-up.
Good day! Do you know if they make any plugins to safeguard against hackers? I'm kinda paranoid about losing everything I've worked hard on. Any recommendations?
Hello Smithe981,
First and foremost we suggest using .htaccess files (for Apache Web Servers) or NGINX config to block access to sensitive files (readme.html, licence.txt etc) and return a 404 error. Secondly we would recommend that all folders (and sub-folders) are setup with 755 permissions and files are set to 644. If you want to protect things further we would suggest changing wp-config,php to 600,
More on file permissions: https://codex.wordpress.org/Changing_File_Permissions
Make regular backups of your content - we use Updraft Backup but there are others out there. Be warned that scheduled tasks for backups will only run if someone visits your website. For each visit WordPress checks the status of scheduled tasks and runs them but only if someone has visited the website. We would recommend your web hosting provider sets up a scheduled server task that makes a request to your website to force WordPress to check for scheduled tasks automatically.
We provide website hosting with a really cool backup feature. Your website is securely backed up to a second server (files and database) every day. If something happens to the primary server that prevents your website being shown then the backup server will take over.
Don't install loads of plugins on your website as you don't know how proficient the developers are in PHP (the programming language) or WordPress best practices. By reducing the number of plugins you can often avoid problems. Keeping your website up to date with the latest plugins and updates is essential but make sure the plugins are compatible with the latest version of the website. Before updating websites we do a backup so we can revert a plugin should an update cause problems.
I hope this answers your question - please let us know if you would like us to do a security audit of your website or help you with website hosting moving forwards.
If your hosting company has good backups then there's no chance you will lose everything you've worked hard on. We use WP Engine which does daily backups with easy one-click restores. I think people get carried away with security plugins etc. and by following some simple best practices, you can keep your WordPress website secure without weighing it down with major security plugins. See my post about this here.
thanks for sharing I have added the simple maths line to all my clients contact forms
Brilliant, I hope this helps to reduce spam for your clients.
Ksatie i have used this for myself and it has helped reduce my spam. Thankyou!
We've released the Magic Tooltips for Contact Form 7 plugin.
You can add tooltips to your Contact Form 7 Forms easily and quickly.
Our Contact Form 7 tooltips plugin comes with a Tooltip Style Generator to make styling your tooltips easy.
You can check it out on WordPress here:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/magic-tooltips-for-contact-form-7/
or here:
https://contactform7.magictooltips.com/
You can see the plugin in action here: https://contactform7.magictooltips.com/contact
Thanks for letting me know, I'll check it out. Tooltips sound like a good way to add explanatory information about contact forms without cluttering up the page in the way that other notes do.
I have been getting a lot of blank spam mails from the contact form lately and I needed this one :)
Thank you Katie!
PS: I am a first timer on this blog. I usually don't get Co.UK results on my search since I belong in India :)
Thanks for this...extremely helpful.
We also use the "Really Simple CAPTCHA" plugin for spam protection on Contact Form 7, but a very good and interesting article if you're looking an alternative.
Yes that works. I think it's nice to try to find alternatives to CAPTCHA where possible, ideally ones that don't impact on user-experience. But Really Simple CAPTCHA is a good plugin and we have used it before.
Superb post. Never knew this, appreciate it for letting me know.
Very grateful for this clearly written information! Thanks.
Hi Katie,
Thanks for sharing.
Is there a way to disable copy/paste option in the text area? So that we can block marketers from pasting their content and sending to us.
And also is there a way to block particular words to be sent?
Thank you.
Hi Vijay, yes Contact Form 7 has an option to block specific words - see https://contactform7.com/comment-blacklist/. There are plugins that disable right clicking on your whole website (not just Contact Form 7) such as WP-CopyProtect which we have used before. Personally I hate these plugins - if people want to copy your content then they will find another way, and this really interferes with user experience as there are lots of valid reasons to right click.
Very nice and wise collection of words to describe the importance of anti-spam plugins.
I am running a video website. And when I started it, the Akismet was already installed. I want to ask is it necessary to install more anti-spam plugins to protect my website. I mean, professionally how many anti-spam plugins should be installed if you want 100% protection.
There's no such thing as 100% protection against spam. My advice is to see how you get on with Akismet. If you're getting little or no spam then don't bulk up your website by adding extra plugins. If you're still getting quite a lot of spam then you may need to try additional anti-spam measures. Use trial and error until you get to a point where you're getting little or no spam, with as few plugins as possible. Don't just add extra plugins for the sake of it.
I am using a similar setup right now for one of my clients. Another thing we are doing is using Disqus for the comment mechanism. That also helps to monitor SPAM as it is moderated. I also started to use Akismet, Honeypot, adding a quiz, and setting a minimum character limit. I can't set a maximum because a lot of people using the contact forms right War and Peace style messages. I am going to make the suggestion to limit that as well.
Thanks for the tips
Thanks for sharing...very helpful article
You really gave me an idea on how to make my contact form spamless, let me try one of those plug-ins :)
Thanks Katie for sharing this. Most of the websites I do are WordPress websites. For spam protection on Contact Form 7 I use "Really Simple CAPTCHA" plugin, its pretty easy to configure. I never used Honeypot, I think it is more easier to configure, I should give it a try.
Thanks again for such useful tips.
Hi Niki, the benefit of a honeypot over CAPTCHA is that is happens in the background without bothering real users who are submitting your form. A lot of people find CAPTCHA frustrating and there's a definite movement away from CAPTCHAS at the moment, however if you're using CAPTCHA then Really Simple CAPTCHA is the best one I'm aware of.
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