Your website is a valuable online resource for your customers and your business. Unfortunately, it’s also a target for spam. Combatting spam is part of being online. An essential part of managing your website is engaging in a constant battle against web spam, especially as evolving tech and AI tools accelerate it.
But, you also have to balance your spam prevention methods with user experience, so potential customers can still access and navigate your site. The reality is that it is an art of balancing ease of use, tolerating spam, and prioritizing spam prevention. There are a lot of things you can implement and layer to combat web spam. What makes the most sense for you will depend on your business, your goals, your target audience, and your website. Here’s how to prevent spam form submissions on your website:
- Add CAPTCHA to your website forms.
- Include a honeypot field.
- Use form validation.
- Add a field to ask a question.
- Limit submissions.
- Make use of block lists.
- Block submissions based on keyword filters.
- Take advantage of anti-spam plugins or services.
- Create a plan to combat comment spam.
- Obscure how forms are submitted.
1. Add CAPTCHA to Your Website Forms
CAPTCHA is a common way to prevent automated form spam, and one that you likely come across often. Those distorted numbers and letters you have to identify or image selections based on a prompt? Those are CAPTCHA anti-spam measures designed in a way that humans can solve and bots cannot.
It’s like a “Turing test” for differentiating between human and bot users and validating them. Although it’s not foolproof, and spam form submissions can still sneak by, it can help reduce how many you receive and prevent bots or AI agents from hammering your website forms.
Implementation Ranges From Basic to Advanced
reCAPTCHA, specifically, is a Google service that helps protect websites from spam. Although initial signup can be annoying, basic implementation is relatively easy and is a standard layer of protection against web spam. There are more advanced options and implementations available. Depending on your situation, those could make sense for you.
Avoid Negatively Impacting User Experience Where You Can
Unfortunately, reCAPTCHA can also be annoying and can negatively impact user experience and conversions. Even with this basic layer of protection, it’s still a balance of allowing enough access for a good user experience that encourages conversions from the people you want while reducing spam submissions from bots or people.
Most Common Types of reCAPTCHA For Websites
There are a few different versions of reCAPTCHA for website forms. “I’m not a robot” and invisible are two broad categories for reCAPTCHA v2. There is also reCAPTCHA for Android apps as well as v3 implementations.
“I’m not a Robot” reCAPTCHA
Basic implementations of this reCAPTCHA require users to click a checkbox to verify that they are not a robot. Using a risk analysis engine to detect and evaluate, users will either be validated and pass, or they will be required to solve simple puzzles in order to validate that they are human. These can become annoying for potential customers, but they can filter out a lot of web spam, too.
Invisible reCAPTCHA
Invisible reCAPTCHA provides a visible badge to indicate the form is “protected by reCAPTCHA”, but does not require a user to click on a checkbox for validation unless their activity is flagged as suspicious. By default, this option only prompts the most suspicious traffic to solve a puzzle for validation. You can adjust this to suit your site security preferences and needs in the advanced settings.
2. Include a Honeypot Field
Another classic layer of web spam prevention is building a honeypot field into your website forms. A honeypot field is a hidden form field. It’s not visible to human users and doesn’t affect their user experience, but bots will fill it out. This allows you to easily identify and block spam form submissions on your website, at least those that get caught in this trap.
3. Use Form Validation
Good website forms will have form validation built in. Using data validation, form validation ensures that form submissions have correctly formatted data and use valid email addresses. Any form submissions that do not meet the form validation criteria are rejected.
There are often default settings and advanced settings that allow you to customize the type and level of validation that is right for your website forms. This is another layer of spam prevention that can help you reduce web spam on your website.
4. Add a Field to Ask a Question
Another way to cut down on spam form submissions on your website is to edit your form design and add a field that asks a basic question, usually something related to text or solving a simple math problem. A user would have to answer it correctly to submit the form.
This is another method of form validation and doesn’t use CAPTCHA. It can help reduce spam submissions and is a useful way to validate responses in a survey. Depending on how well agentic AI gets at being able to understand and answer questions, this may become less useful over time. Monitoring form interaction data can help inform design decisions and help you evaluate this.
You also want to balance this with the rest of your form design and consider user experience. Users will often abandon forms that are too long, frustrating, or confusing. This can be a reason why your contact page design could be hurting conversions. If your form is already asking a lot or the lead magnet you’re offering doesn’t justify a longer form, avoid adding another field and rely on other anti-spam methods.
5. Limit Submissions
Not all spam form submissions are from bots. Sometimes, humans are the ones spamming your website forms for comment or link spam schemes, lead or appointment setting scams, or other scams.
If your website forms are getting hammered by the same person or a real enough entity that is bypassing your other spam prevention methods, you can adjust your form settings to limit how many submissions are accepted on that form.
Limit by Frequency
You can block the form once a user completes and submits, or you can set a specific frequency cap and time period. This establishes a rate limit to prevent too many requests in a short period of time. This is a useful method for dealing with bots or human users who are overwhelming your forms.
Limit by Other Parameters
Depending on what you’re dealing with, this could be an approach that limits submissions to 1 per email address or “x” submissions per whatever parameters best fit your situation to prevent repeated spam submissions.
6. Make Use of Block Lists
If you’re really running into issues with spammy website form submissions coming from certain email domains or IP addresses, you can block them to keep them from submitting forms. Using IP/email blocking, you can block IP addresses that have a reputation for spam or free email domains that are often associated with spam.
There is a balance to this, so you aren’t also filtering out real people in your target audience. However, using IP/email blocking carefully and strategically can help reduce and prevent spam on your website.
7. Block Submissions Based on Keyword Filters
Another option for reducing spam submissions on your website is using keyword filters to block forms that are likely to be spam. If certain keywords are commonly used in spam form submissions and not also used by real submissions from your target audience, you can build a list and create a filter that blocks form submissions that contain them.
This can be a useful way to filter out and block spam, while still allowing real form submissions. Similar to IP and email blocking, you need to be careful with keyword filters so that you are not unintentionally blocking real and relevant leads.
8. Take Advantage of Anti-Spam Plugins or Services
If you’re using a CMS for your website, like WordPress, Shopify, etc., there will often be platform-specific plugins and services available that you can leverage for additional spam prevention.
The right fit will depend on your website and the volume of traffic and form submissions you receive. Although there are some free options available to handle lower volumes, higher volumes usually require paid accounts. However, if you’re dealing with a lot of spam form submissions despite having other spam prevention methods in place, the investment is often worth it.
9. Create a Plan to Combat Comment Spam
Comment sections are a magnet for spammers and scammers, human and bot alike. If your website has a blog and you allow comments, or you have forms for other types of user-generated content, you will need a layered implementation to manage and prevent comment spam. You will also want to make sure that you either disallow links in your comments or that you have robust protection from spammy or malicious links.
Link insertion scams in comments are common, whether for a phishing attempt or outdated spammy link building tactics, and can result in your website getting hacked if you are not careful. Comment spam can be overwhelming, and an unprotected or unmonitored comment section is a major security risk.
10. Obscure How Forms Are Submitted
Although it is less common and less useful than other methods now, obscuring how forms are submitted is still a spam prevention method worth acknowledging. Using JavaScript via AJAX can obscure how a user can submit a form and what happens when a user submits a form.
This can include removing the default submit behavior, sending the data asynchronously, hiding success or error messages, hiding or changing visual cues for the submit button to make it less obvious, etc.. It’s not great for user experience, accessibility, or conversions, and is a web design mistake in many cases, but it can give you some breathing room and help stem the flow of spam submissions while you figure out the next steps.
Sophisticated bots can usually detect and ignore common obfuscation methods, so it isn’t a good long-term solution, but it could make sense as a short-term fix while you build out a better, long-term solution. In certain situations, obfuscation may still be a useful layer to implement as part of a multi-layered approach to preventing spam.
Position Your Website to Win the War Against Web Spam
You can unlock customer insights with smarter data collection on your site, including form interactions and form submissions. But, you also need to figure out how to effectively manage, reduce, and prevent spam while balancing user experience and lead generation.
These are some different ways to help reduce and prevent spam form submissions on your website. You won’t be able to prevent web spam entirely, but these tactics can help you reduce how many you get and keep you from getting hammered with spammy form submissions.
The right balance of forms, fields, page design, access methods, and prevention methods will depend on your website, business, and situation. Striking the right balance and implementing a layered approach to spam prevention on your website can help you set a strong foundation and position your website to win the war against web spam.