If you have a website with a contact form, you’ve probably experienced it: fake inquiries, SEO solicitations, website development pitches, suspicious links and bots filling out your forms.
For the WordPress websites I build and maintain for clients, one of the tools I’ve used for several years to combat this is CleanTalk Anti-Spam. I use it on my own websites too.
Stopping Website Spam Before It Hits the Inbox
CleanTalk works behind the scenes to analyze form submissions and determine whether they appear legitimate or should be blocked. It can protect contact forms, comments, registrations, subscriptions, WooCommerce activity and other forms without requiring legitimate visitors to deal with CAPTCHA.
For the visitor, the spam protection is essentially invisible. For the bots? Not so much.
Seeing What CleanTalk Actually Blocks
CleanTalk provides a dashboard where I can review activity across the websites I manage.
I generally check the denied submissions about once a week to make sure a legitimate inquiry wasn’t accidentally caught in the filter.
The dashboard lets me see what was submitted, the IP address and location, which page it came through and why it was denied. If something legitimate was blocked, I can mark it as “Not Spam.” It will then email me the submission again.
I like having that visibility rather than simply trusting that everything the software blocked was actually spam.
Country Filtering for Local Businesses
Many of the websites I manage are for local or regional service businesses that only serve customers in the United States. CleanTalk’s country filtering is particularly useful in those situations.
If a business doesn’t provide services outside the U.S., there is generally no reason its contact forms need to accept submissions from around the world. Filtering those submissions can eliminate a significant amount of irrelevant spam.
More Than Contact Forms
CleanTalk can protect several areas of a WordPress website, including contact forms, comments, registrations, subscriptions, booking forms and WooCommerce activity. It also works with many popular WordPress form builders and plugins.
Another feature is SpamFireWall, which can stop requests from known spam-active IP addresses before they fully access the website, helping reduce unwanted bot traffic as well as spam submissions.
Why I Continue to Use CleanTalk
No spam filter is perfect, which is why I periodically review what’s being denied. Often times the ones that aren’t spam is when a customer fills out the form and instead of entering .com, they use .con, or something, completely accident, so naturally it gets blocked for being a fake (read: wrong) email. What matters to me is that CleanTalk dramatically reduces the junk while still giving me the ability to see exactly what was blocked.
After using it for several years across websites I own and manage, CleanTalk has earned a permanent spot in my WordPress toolbox. It saves me time, saves my clients from sorting through piles of garbage submissions and gives me a centralized place to monitor what’s happening.
And when I check the denied log and find another “Here’s the pitch in one sentence…” AI marketing solicitation?
Yeah. You can keep that one, CleanTalk.
If your WordPress contact forms are constantly being hit with spam, CleanTalk is worth checking out.
Disclosure: I have used CleanTalk for several years on websites I own and manage. I am also a CleanTalk affiliate, so I may receive a commission if you purchase through my link, at no additional cost to you. CleanTalk offers additional service time for publishing a qualifying review; the opinions and experience shared here are my own.
Leave a Reply