If you have a contact or comment form on your website, it’s highly recommended to have a captcha check, which helps prevent spam.
The majority of web spam comes from automated bots, which are computer programs that crawl the internet and look for message forms. They often include a website address in their spam messages, hoping that it’ll drive extra traffic to their website. Sometimes these links also contain viruses.
New websites may get little or no spam, but often established websites get more and more spam, because it can take a while for bots to find your website.
By having a captcha check on your contact or comment forms, this makes it much harder for bots to submit their message.
A good system to use is Google reCaptcha, which looks like a simple tick box on your contact form:
However, behind the scenes it’s a lot more sophisticated and it scans what the user is doing. For instance, reCaptcha may detect the form was typed in too quickly to be a human, or that the user has submitted too many reCaptcha forms in the past hour. If Google believes the user is a spammer, they will increase the difficulty of the challenge tests to slow the user down, or may block them completely.
No anti-spam solution is entirely perfect, but this system will certainly help reduce your spam levels considerably.
If you would like us to install reCaptcha on your website, please contact us. We will also need you to do the steps below.
How do I setup a Google reCaptcha account?
Firstly, you will need a free Google account.
- Go to https://www.google.com/recaptcha/admin and sign-in using your Google login details.
- Complete the “Register a new site” form as shown below:
- Label: You can enter anything here, but we suggest using your website address as the label.
- Choose the type of reCAPTCHA: Select “reCAPTCHA V2“.
- Domains: Enter your website address(es), without the http://, https://, or www. prefix.
- Read and accept the Terms of Service.
- Then click “Register”.
- Next, you’ll see two keys:
- Copy and paste these keys into a message to Primary Image. Please ensure you clearly label which one is the “site key” and which one is the “secret key”.
We can then setup the reCaptcha checks on your website forms.