Site security and specialized form data

You can do more to keep your website safe. Running a safe business reflects on your reputation. Look at how you structure your website’s contact form. What does yours contain? Do you have a standard form with plain text and an email field? Hands up if you do.

The contact form can filter your emails

Did you know that you can create your form in such a way, that it makes a pre-selection in favour of you, your business and your project missions? Customize your contact form to your purpose. The more specific your contact form is, the less likely you receive SPAM.

Form content

All fields can be edited to be optional or required fields. In the Webnode editor, you can add the following items to your form:

• Add contact info (such as name, email address, or phone number)
• Give (multiple) choices
• Drop down menu for specific choices
• Let visitors attach files
• Add a date to book a meeting or consultation
• Insert a number

Small tip:

Avoid making your form with too many numbers. Otherwise, people might suspect it as being a phishing site.

Blank form & contact forms

Use the add contents function in the website editor to choose between the blank form or a pre-suggested simple contact form.

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Fixed blank from (left) and the contact form (right)

The blank form is the minimalist among forms and is designed to just give one piece of information away. Usually the visitors’ email. This way your fans can subscribe to your newsletter for example.

To win valuable serious contacts, we advise you to select the normal contact form to which you can add unlimited fields with the Premium Plans Mini and higher.

Have a look at the two examples below:

Simple contact form

Example of a specific complex contact form

The simpler the form is, the easier it is for robots to fill it with junk. It is also a call to those who like to babble on to reach you and those who like to complain and let it all out.

Wouldn’t you agree the more complex form lets people genuinely interested in your service contact you? Because your customers and potential collaborators can specify what they need, you will be able to filter their requests efficiently. In the long run, it will let you solve their issues faster and lead to higher customer satisfaction. Win-win.

GDPR friendly

Be open about your data privacy policy. You are gathering the information for research or marketing purposes? Maybe you’re planning on conducting contact data enrichment to have more structured and up-to-date data. Make it clear and let senders agree with it by adding a data consent to your form.

Add the item data consent to link to your privacy policy and let people agree with it

Moreover, you can further refine and optimize the form to better suit your business requirements.

Secure your site and data

What if you could filter out all unwanted and potentially risky emails that can harm your business before they even land in your mailbox? Now, you can. With this bundle of three features, you keep your inbox tidy:

• SPAM filter
• Blocking IP-addresses
• Malware scan

Upon selecting your Premium Plan at checkout the site security is an add-on you will not miss.

Imagine, you teach kids how to play football after school, but personally, you want to develop further. Thus you invested in becoming a personal life coach online and just created your business website. Proud you are. All is clear on your pages. Your potential clients should easily book a session with you via your contact form. Social media ads are running. All is rolling. You are excited.

Bing! You got mail. Someone wrote you a request on your contact form. So cool, your first client! You open the mail and feel disappointed. Someone asks if you’ll donate to charity.

To further enhance your website’s security and ensure only legitimate inquiries reach you, consider utilizing data engineering services for advanced spam filtering and data analysis solutions.

Blocking access

Unwanted messages from forms are annoying and discouraging. You can end this and filter access to your website by blocking the IP address. Here you can also decide in the project administration if you like to block the entire access to your site.

You can filter by the exact sender, meaning the IP address the form was sent from. On top of that, the filter also allows you to select specific countries; in case you suspect further unwanted messages from the same region. Blocking a whole country is maybe the last resort, but it is good to know you can 😉

SPAM filter

You are hoping for some lead contact or a booking and instead, you get gibberish. Roughly 15 billion SPAM emails go out daily. Like the doves helped Cinderella to sort out the good seeds from the bad ones, SPAM bots have no chance by activating the reCAPTCHA in your project administration.

Malware scanning

Perhaps you like your clients to attach a document to the form. These could be details about their status and goals in life or a short questionnaire. Now you can scan all attachments for broken files or malware. Did you know, malware is easily transferred? 560,000 new pieces of malware are detected every day. To protect yourself, it’s crucial to know how to prevent malware in the first place.

No need to worry about this one any longer. When a potential client sends you, for example, a pdf, Webnodes system performs an automatic anti-virus scan you can easily set up your project administration.

Backup

Did you know that changes you do to your website in the editor are automatically saved on Webnodes EU-based secure servers? Should it ever happen that you accidentally deleted something, automatic backups will restore your site.

More tricks to gain valuable contacts

Register your domain with data privacy

If you register your domain without data privacy everyone who searches for your domain name in online databases can see the full contact details that you entered at the time of domain registration. This will make you:

• publicly visible

• an easy contact target for SPAM emails

So, always register all your domain names with data privacy.

Reputation

A good reputation is reflected on your website and attracts the right clientele.

This is why you should monitor your site: You…

• study your competitors and analyse their strengths and weaknesses and compare.
• are looking for leads – users, who are potentially interested in becoming your clients.
• study the field you are working in with the goal to find out what your potential clients are looking for.

All this can be achieved by reputation screening. We recommend using services like YouScan and Brand Analytics.

7 ways to avoid malware on any website

1. Scan Your Site Regularly
2. Take Regular Backups
3. Perform Updates
4. Upgrade Your Hosting Plan
5. Use SSL and HTTPS
6. Enforce Secure Passwords
7. Install a Web Application Firewall

Webnode automatically runs all websites with SSL security under HTTPS on all devices. Regardless, of whether it is a free or Premium project. So, with Webnode’s security functions and backups, you are already halfway there.

Do you like to get more people to see what you are offering? Have a look at our tips on how to boost traffic to your site.