Most common threats to contact forms
Spam bots
Automated bots crawl the web looking for open forms to fill with irrelevant links, fake emails, or promotional content. This fills your inbox with junk, pollutes your database with useless entries, and increases your email bounce rate if autoresponders are sent to fake email addresses.
Fake or malicious submissions
Forms may be used to submit intentionally misleading data, which can waste time and resources. It also skews analytics that can impact your decision-making.
Form abuse and overuse
If your form has no usage limits or access restrictions, the same person or bot can submit it hundreds of times.
Best practices to secure your contact forms
Use CAPTCHA
Use CAPTCHA or reCAPTCHA to make sure form submissions are coming from real humans. Securing your form with CAPTCHA is one of the simplest steps you can take to protect your business. It only takes a moment to set up, but it can save you hours of cleanup and protect your reputation from bot abuse.
Zoho Forms offers a secure form builder with basic CAPTCHA that requires users to manually enter the characters shown, as well as Google’s reCAPTCHA (v2 and v3).
When should you use CAPTCHA?
- Your contact form is embedded on a public website or blog.
- You are running ad campaigns and directing traffic to a lead capture form.
- You have previously received spam submissions or fake leads.
Set strict field validation
When users enter incorrect or suspicious inputs like fake email addresses, incomplete phone numbers, or special characters in name fields, it can compromise the quality of your data and lead to follow-up issues, from failed email deliveries to misrouted tasks.
How Zoho Forms helps
Zoho Forms is an online form generator that makes it easy to implement robust validation rules across your forms to ensure data accuracy right from the point of entry.
Email validations
Allow or restrict specific email domains, providing flexibility in tailoring the form to your needs.
Prompt respondents to re-enter their email address for confirmation, ensuring that both inputs match, preventing any typos.
Mark the email field as mandatory to ensure respondents cannot submit the form without entering the data in this field. This also prevents the submission of identical entries.
Custom entry formats
For advanced needs, Zoho Forms supports custom entry formats, allowing you to define highly specific patterns that the input must match, perfect for IDs, custom codes, or multi-part entries.
Real-time error messages
Users see validation errors immediately to correct mistakes before submission.
Restrict form access and submissions
Your contact form is the gateway to your business. Leaving it open to everyone without limits can lead to spam, fake inquiries, or repeated entries that waste time and dilute lead quality. By restricting who can access and submit your contact form, you ensure your team hears only from genuine prospects
Zoho Forms lets you do this by:
- Limiting submissions per user or IP address.
- Capping the number of submissions you can receive.
- Blocking multiple responses from the same network.
Geo-restrictions
Limit access to your contact form based on the respondent’s region. If your product or service is only available in select markets (for example, the US and Canada), you can restrict form visibility to those regions. This avoids confusion for users outside your service area and ensures your team receives only relevant leads.
Use OTP verification for email, phone, or WhatsApp
Contact forms are prime targets for spam and fake leads. By verifying a respondent’s identity through an OTP (one-time password), you ensure that only real users with valid contact details can submit your form, saving your team time and improving the quality of your leads.
With Zoho Forms as your contact form builder, you can enable OTP verification via email, mobile number, or WhatsApp to confirm the respondent's identity before submission. A one-time password is sent to the channel, and users must enter it correctly to proceed.
Use double opt-in
Double opt-in is a simple, powerful way to stop spam before it hits your inbox.
When someone fills out your contact form, they’ll get a confirmation email. Their message is only submitted once they confirm the email. No confirmation? No entry. This ensures that the auto-responders sent on form submission go to actual humans.
Just set it once in Zoho Forms and let it quietly guard your form 24/7.
Ready to secure your contact form the smart way?
With Zoho Forms, protecting your form is effortless; no coding, no stress, just powerful built-in features that keep your data clean and your team focused on real leads. Whether you're dealing with spam bots or just want to ensure every entry is genuine, Zoho Forms has your back.
Explore examples of contact forms and understand the advantages of using contact forms to collect reliable leads.
Start building your secure contact form today!