Having forms on your site instead of email as a means of contact is a great way of minimising junk email - we know spammers love to get their hands on email addresses. Forms are susceptible to spambots, however; you will have noticed most sites now use a form of "
CAPTCHA", where you, the user, have to type in words or numbers displayed before you submit the form.
CAPTCHA stops spambots. CAPTCHA relies on you, the human, seeing an image with the letters and numbers embedded in it, often distorted to make it harder for spambots to analyse. If you leave the CAPTCHA field blank, your form cannot be submitted. Spambots can't 'read' CAPTCHA images.
Many of the forms on our client WordPress sites use the excellent
Contact Form 7 plugin to easily build the form, together with
Really Simple CAPTCHA, from the same developer, to add that anti-spam layer of security. Really Simple Captcha IS really simple - four letters or numbers that your readers have to type into the box; however, it works effectively. We have been using it on our site and a number of client sites for ages.
While there are other form builder plugins out there Contact Form 7 is easy to use for people who don't have programming experience. If you're a small business owner running a non-IT business, you don't have the time or need to learn to program fiddly forms. We've chosen an easy and effective method for you to create new forms and edit existing ones.
If you are one of our clients and still getting spam from your forms,
contact us and we'll look into the issue and fix it for you.
