Topic
The enquiry form is where most WordPress sites quietly lose money.
Every other topic here is written for the person building the site. This one is written for the person whose phone stops ringing when the form goes wrong — and the form goes wrong in two directions at once.
It lets through what it should stop: automated spam, and genuine enquiries from people you cannot serve. And it stops what it should let through: real customers who abandoned at a challenge, a validation rule that rejected their number, or a field that failed on mobile. The second failure is the expensive one and the one nobody measures, because a lost enquiry leaves no log entry. What we write about here is how to tell the two apart, which defences work server-side rather than in a browser the bot never opened, and how to verify a change helped instead of assuming it did.
Forms
2 articles in this topic
You can stop Contact Form 7 spam without making every real visitor prove they are human.
CAPTCHA is the default answer to form spam and it is the one that costs you real enquiries. Here is what actually stops the bots, why it works, and how to verify it without guessing.
Read more → FormsYour enquiry form is full of leads from three states away, and the reason is not what most people assume.
Out-of-area enquiries are rarely spam. They are real people you cannot serve, arriving through channels you did not choose. Here is where they come from and how to filter them at the form.
Read more →