How to stop Contact Form 7 spam for good 5 easy ways
How to stop Contact Form 7 spam for good - 5 easy ways
In this video I’m going to walk you through what Contact Form 7 is, how to install it and get it on your website and then how to protect the form so that you don’t get bombarded with spam emails.
So what is Contact Form 7?
Contact Form 7 is a super easy to use plugin that quickly adds a contact form feature to your website, allowing visitors or send you messages. Its easy to customise and probably part of the reason why it is one of the most popular plugins in the WordPress repository with over 5 million downloads.
What is the issues with Contact Form 7?
Once installed the form is a bare bones plugin so has no styling and no protection from spam. So if we do not address this issue, we will get bombarded with spam emails every day.
My Solutions:
1. A Plugin : Contact Form 7 Spam Killer
This solution is quick and easy, simply search for this plugin in the repository, install it and activate it in the settings. This will add a quiz to your contact form making it less likely that any bots will be able to send you spam messages.
2. Contact Form 7 Built in Quiz
In the Contact Form documentation they show you a quick and easy way to add a quiz to your contact form to prevent spam: [https://contactform7.com/quiz/](https://contactform7.com/quiz/)
Super easy to configure, you just add the shortcode form the documentation (you can edit the question and answer to your liking).
e.g. [quiz math-quiz "12+48=?|60"]
This adds a quiz to your form asking the user what 12+48 is. As you can see the answer is pre set to 60 so if the user does not enter 60, the form can not be sent.
3. Akismet Spam Protection
Chances are your site already has this plugin installed and you didn’t even notice it. Well Akismet is a great plugin for eliminating spam comments in your blog post so if you’ve got a blog, you should be using this plugin. It can also be configured to be used with Contact Form 7. You can read Contact Form 7’s documentation here: [https://contactform7.com/spam-filteri...](https://contactform7.com/spam-filteri...)
This method is super easy to set up and configure. The way it works is that you assign certain fields to Akismets spam protection checker and the enquires go through Akismets spam filtering to work out if the message is genuine or not.
There are 3 different fields it can validate agains:
akismet:author
akismet:author_email
akismet:author_url
An example of how you would implement this would be to edit the shortcodes in your contact form like this:
[text* your-name] would become [text* your-name akismet:author]
4. Honeypot for Contact Form 7
I love the idea of this plugin, maybe its the Mr Robot fan in me (If you know, you know). So the way this works, you install a very lightweight plugin which allows you to create an additional input type to contact form 7. This field is called a honeypot and it basically an invisible field. You can lable it something simple like email-address. Human users when they are looking at your contact form can not see this field so will be unable to fill it in. However, bots who read the code can see it and will attempt to enter an email address in this field to ensure they can get through to you. This is where the plugin steps in, if this honeypot field is populated then the message gets filtered as spam and you never get it.
5. Google Invisible reCaptch Integration
Now we’re talking. Everyone knows what a reCaptcha is and how annoying they are but what if I told you there was a way of using this technology without the quiz? Well Google recaptch v3 is invisible and works.
Contact Form 7 allows for integration with Google reCaptch and it makes it super easy to work. Simply follow the instructions under the integration tab or watch the video above and get this working in minutes.
If you have any issues or question, please leave a comment blow and I’ll be happy to answer.
Chapters
00:00 - Intro (The problem at hand).
00:13 - Bumper.
00:18 - Who am I?
00:29 - What is Contact Form 7?
00:51 - What are the downsides to Contact Form 7?
01:15 - How to install and set up Contact Form 7.
03:04 - Option 1 - Using a plugin such as ‘Contact Form 7 Spam Killer’
05:29 - Option 2 - Using Contact Form 7’s built in quiz.
07:47 - Option 3 - Using Akismet Spam Protection Integration.
12:17 - Option 4 - Using Honeypot for Contact Form 7.
15:37 - Option 5 - Using Contact Form 7’s Integration with Google’s invisible reCaptcha v3.
18:06 - Outro
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