There are several reasons why spam could be coming through your website: automated bots, email harvesting for marketing purposes, or even targeted attacks (for most small businesses, this is usually not the case).
Fortunately, there are several things we can do to cut down on the spam. A popular solution is the “I’m not a robot” checkbox you’ve probably seen across the web. Google makes this CAPTCHA solution and gives it away for free. There are even invisible versions that you may not notice on the front end.
From time to time, we may need to tweak the settings on your CAPTCHA to tighten up security. We can even swap out Google’s CAPTCHA for another solution called Turnstile by Cloudflare. It looks similar and does the same job: it cuts down on spam coming through your form. (It’s what protects the contact form on this website.)
Actionable tip: if you’re receiving spam daily from one of your website’s forms, please let me know. I won’t know unless you tell me. Then we can tweak the CAPTCHA settings to cut down on the spam.
About the author
Leighton Smith is Pioneer Media’s website designer, web developer and webmaster, based in East Tennessee. As a solopreneur, he is each client’s one point of contact and has built hundreds of websites since learning to code in 2006.
