If you use a contact form on your website or in your marketing, you probably want to avoid letting spam bots and human prevent bots and spam from submitting contact form. These bots typically use contact forms to promote a product or service, gain access to trial accounts, or pilfer email lists.

While it’s impossible to eliminate all spam bot submissions, there are several techniques that you can implement to reduce the amount of spam you receive from your contact form. Various methods look for things like a shortened URL, a cookieless form, the number of submissions from the same IP address or domain, and more. These methods can be applied to both visible and invisible contact forms to prevent spam bots from submitting your contact form.

Verifying Phone Number Status with Modern Tools

Many popular contact form plugins include settings that make it harder for bots to submit your form, such as a honeypot field or ReCAPTCHA checkbox. The honeypot method creates a hidden field on your form that is visible to bots but not to humans. When a bot fills out the field, it’s considered spam and is blocked from submitting your form again.

Some methods require you to change your web server configuration, but others can be implemented on the client-side by using a timed cookie, for example. This method tracks the time that the page is served and compares it to when a form submission is made. If there is a large difference, it can be assumed that the submission came from a bot and will be rejected.…