Have you been having trouble with Spam from your Contact Page on your WordPress blog? This is a quick way to Block Spam from a WordPress Contact Page.
Every good website has a Contact page to ensure that users can get questions answers, and customers can engage before buying goods and services. The trouble is that every bad robot spider trawling the web knows that too, and targets input forms and contact pages. Pretty soon after putting your Contact Page live you can expect to start receiving emails about Viagra, poorly crafted meaningless comments containing back links, or just random strings of characters. While the delete key handles these things quickly and efficiently, the net effect is to dilute our energy which should be directed a answering the real questions from our customers. What we need is a better solution.
What Stops The Bots?
To stop the spiders from even posting the contact form we need to install a WordPress CAPTCHA plugin. A CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is a challenge-response test used to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer or Bot. It can be as simple as identifying if a picture of an animal is a cat or a dog, which is easy for a human, but a challenge for a Bot. The most common forms use distorted images of letters and numbers, which the human eye can easily distinguish due to pattern matching capabilities within our brains. Go humans!
How To Block Spam from a WordPress Contact Page
If you are using the Contact Form 7 plugin, there is a Really Simple CAPTCHA plugin which integrates right in to the Contact Form 7. While not strongly secure, it will at least stop the script kiddies and bots having an open door. To install it carry out the following steps:
- In the Plugins section of the Dashboard, click on Add New
- Search for plugins by keyword Term Really Simple CAPTCHA
- Next to Really Simple CAPTCHA, click on Install Now
What Else Can Block Spam
If the Really Simple CAPTCHA plugin does not meet the requirements, there are a number of other measures we can use to block Spam from WordPress contact pages, including:
- Secure CAPTCHA, which uses hard to break and easy to read secure CAPTCHA images from SecureCAPTCHA.net.
- Contact Form by ContactMe.com, which is a fully customizable contact form which automatically adds your contacts to a free online contacts database.
- Fast Secure Contact Form which supports sending mail to multiple departments, and redirects to any URL after the message is sent.
Hopefully using one of these methods we can see the back of spam contacts from the contacts page, and get back to the business of responding to or customers and genuine visitors.
Finally, some useful Resources to help block Spam from a WordPress Contact Page