Contact form spam can be averted by using Captcha which consists of alpha-numeric images which might be difficult to decipher by the users but if you do not apply Captcha in your contact form, it’s likely that your mailbox will be flooded with numerous spam emails. Captcha is the best way to avert contact form spam but people do not feel comfortable entering the Captcha codes as the process sometimes get time consuming when the alpha-numeric codes could not be interpreted properly. This may end up in visitors refusing to fill the contact form in your website and you will end up losing a prospective customer.
Website owner’s opinion on using Captcha
Many website owners have formatted their contact forms with Captcha codes to avoid contact form spam but only for a brief period of time due to its disadvantages. They claimed that the idea of using Captcha is simple as the visitor of the website just had to add a hard to comprehend image of a few random letters and numbers to identify themselves as humans and not robots by entering the text after comprehending it. But its disadvantage lies in the fact that adding difficult to read random letters will be hard to comprehend by the visitors and they may decline filling up the contact form.
How to make the contact form spam-free without using Captcha?
The obvious question revolving in your mind is that what might be the solution to make your contact form free without implementing the irritating Captcha. Well, there are two ways to do this. You can use Akismet contact form anti-spam or Gravity Forms anti-spam honeypot.
How to use Akismet to avoid contact form anti-spam?
You can use Akismet Plugin active with a valid subscription of Akismet. You can use Jetpack Plugin along with active Akismet Plugin. These will auto-check all your form submissions to determine whether they are spam. You can also set Contact Form 7 to use Akismet for checking spam.
Anti-spam honeypot for gravity forms
You can use Gravity Forms Plugin in a smarter way to avoid the use of Captcha. You can use anti-spam honeypot to add an invisible field effectively in to the form. Bots fill all the fields in the form without being able to read the required fields. When the invisible field is filled on a Gravity Form, then it could be understood that the form is filled by bots and not humans. The invisible fields cannot be seen by humans.
How to enable anti-spam honeypot?
You can enable anti-spam honeypot in a few simple steps:
Step 1: Click on the Form settings of you contact form.
Step 2: You will find Enable anti-spam honey pot under the Form options
Step 3: Click on it to update your contact Form Settings and activate anti-spam honeypot.
To conclude
These popular contact forms Plugins will surely help you to avert contact form spam without using the annoying and irritating Captcha. Your visitors no longer will decline filling the contact form on your website.