How to Prevent Squarespace Contact Form Spam
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Do you get excited every time you get an email thinking it's a potential lead, only to find out that's it's yet another spam email? Here's how to prevent contact form spam on your Squarespace website.
What we're going to do is set up the forms to use reCAPTCHA, which is a free service provided by Google. It works by checking the website visitor's browsing and past actions to see if they look like a bot, and if they do, Google presents a verification check to prove they aren't a bot. You've probably come across these verifications before yourselves. They're the ones that ask you to select all the images with a crosswalk, or traffic lights, etc.
Step 1 - Sign up for Google ReCAPTCHA
First, we're going to go to this link and sign in to any Google account you have. I use my business email here just to keep all my business stuff together.
Step 2 - Registering your Website with Google
Once you have logged in, you're taken to a page to register your website.
In the Label field, enter anything you want to help you identify what the key is for, I use my website name, so "Adlytic Marketing".
For reCAPTCHA type pick "reCAPTCHA v2" as that's the one that Squarespace supports. Leave the "I'm not a robot" option checked.
For Domains enter your domain without the “https” or the “www”, so I for example would enter "adlyticmarketing.com". The reCAPTCHA will only work on the domain you entered, so if you have multiple Squarespace websites, either enter multiple domains here or create an entirely new key for each site.
Check off the Accept the reCAPTCHA Terms of Service field. and leave everything else as it is and then click on SUBMIT.
Step 3 - Adding Keys to Squarespace
Once you have clicked SUBMIT in the above step, you should arrive at a page that has a SITE KEY and a SECRET KEY. Don't close this page.
Now open up the backend of your Squarespace website, and go to SETTINGS → ADVANCED → EXTERNAL API KEYS. At the very bottom, there is a section for GOOGLE RECAPTCHA. Copy and paste the SITE KEY and the SECRET KEY from Google into these fields and then click SAVE in the top left.
Step 4 - Adding ReCAPTCHA to Forms
Now that you have reCAPTCHA enabled for your website, you simply have to enable it for each form on your website. You can do this by going to the page that the form is on, going into the EDIT view as if you were going to edit the form, and you should see a new tab called CAPTCHA. Inside there is an option to ADD GOOGLE RECAPTCHA. Just check that off and save the page and you're done!
NOTE: While you're editing the form since the domain you're on is something like "mywebsite.squarespace.com", the reCAPTCHA will say "INVALID DOMAIN FOR SITE KEY". You can ignore this message as it only appears to people on the backend site, which should only be you. If you don't like error messages in general, you can fix this by going back to the page on Google where the keys are, click on GO TO SETTINGS, and add your backend Squarespace domain to the DOMAINS list as well.
