Website Contact Form Spam: A Dangerous Waste of Time
Contact forms make it easy for customers to get in touch, but they can also make it easy for scammers and bots to do the same. In some cases, over 50% of small business contact form submissions are spam. At best, this wastes a company’s time by forcing employees to investigate the validity of every submission—which will probably cause some legitimate submissions to get lost in the shuffle. At worst, it can result in real financial losses and security breaches if an employee mistakenly clicks a malicious link or responds to a scam artist. If a barrage of spam submissions hits your website in a short amount of time, it can even overwhelm servers and make your site slow or outright inaccessible.
How To Identify Different Types of Spam
Though the form spam problem might seem overwhelming, there are tactics you can use to tell the difference between spam and real inquiries. Illegitimate submissions come from one of two sources: bots or human spammers. Telltale signs of bots include clusters of numerous submissions in quick succession, nonsensical content, multiple links, and a clueless tone regarding your offerings. Unfortunately, advanced AI is making it easier for bots to write like humans. That’s where technical clues come in. No matter how well AI might mimic human writing, its technical patterns are not at all what you’d expect from a real person. Bots are bad at copying human-style submission rates, mouse movements, navigation patterns, and more. Human-sent spam seems like it should be hard to identify, but even that often has signs you can spot if you know what to look for. At first, human spam might seem to express interest in your specific offerings. A closer look will reveal sneaky attempts to flip that fake interest into a sales pitch. It often has a “salesy” tone that anyone who’s ever seen an infomercial will recognize.
Effective Spam Prevention Techniques
Identification is only one element of fighting contact form spam. You can use other techniques to stop a large percentage of spam submissions before they even arrive in your inbox. Setting these features up requires some technical know-how even when you use built-in features like the ones WordPress offers to deal with WordPress contact form spam, but it’s worth it. Here are just some of the many methods:
- CAPTCHAs: Brief tests that humans can complete much more easily than bots
- IP address tracking: Monitoring and blocking IP addresses with a history of sending spam
- Email verification: Email address confirmation to weed out bots
- Honeypot fields: Fields that are undetectable to humans but not bots
- Submission restrictions: Blocking quick, repeated submissions from a specific source
- Spam-blocking software: Sophisticated software that recognizes subtle signs of spam, including highly technical ones
Balancing Spam Protection With User Experience
Protecting yourself against an influx of spam is important, but so is providing a good user experience for people with a genuine interest in your offerings. Excessive anti-spam protections can make the submission process frustrating for humans, which might cause them to give up. Forms shouldn’t be too complex, and CAPTCHAs should be doable even by humans with special accessibility needs. Progressive security is also helpful. It adds extra security measures only in response to spam-like behaviour. No matter which security measures you choose, it’s vital that they work well on mobile.
