How to Stop Spam Registrations in Magento 2

Getting thousands of registrations every day in your Magento 2 store? Enjoying the traffic! But are those even real users? It is a point worth thinking.

Spam registrations are a result of bots all over the internet, trying to exploit your store and harm your business. The fake signup process uses the fake email address or the real Email IDs without the knowledge of the owners. Such activity harms your email marketing campaign. The email addresses used in registration or newsletter subscriptions receive undesirable newsletters. Your store may be marked spam due to such unwanted emails and if done on large scale, Gmail may blacklist you, hence your newsletter will not be delivered to subscribers.

There are many other reasons too for spam registration such as gather your email address and send you spam emails. There are chances that the bots may find your weakness and exploit your Magento 2 store for their benefit. Bots may get access to your database and marketing insights. Not only using your data, altering it poses huge damage!

These bots activity affects your user experience, email campaigns, and overall business. Customers will have a wrong image of your store. Also, you won’t be able to get the actual idea of where you stand in the market with all the wrong traffic.

The above discussion concludes that store owners must stop spam registrations in Magento 2. But how, is answered here in the post!

Check out the below tips to stop spam registrations in Magento 2:

1. Use of captcha in Magento 2
2. Use of mobile phone number for verification
3. Use of social media accounts for verification
4. Use of the “Honeypot” technique
5. Restrict fake registrations

1. Use of captcha in Magento 2

The use of captcha enables to identify the difference between human and bots. The tasks offered by captcha to select images or type text are usually hard for bots.

The default Magento 2 allows to enable the captcha from Stores > Configuration > Customers > Customer Configuration > CAPTCHA > Forms.

However, with advanced programming, captcha can be easily bypassed. I recommend using Magento 2 Google reCAPTCHA v3 in your stores which auto checks human activities without having them solve quizzes and check “I’m not a robot” button. It protects your Magento 2 stores against spams, bots, and automated abuse.

2. Use of mobile phone number for verification

The use of mobile phone numbers for verification with OTP is an effective and handy method. This method requires the user to enter the phone number and verification code received to complete the desired action successfully.

Website registration and login are the very first step where the mobile number verification is required to identify and authenticate the real users. You can mandate the customers to verify the mobile number with OTP using Magento 2 Mobile Login extension to withstand store security.

3. Use of social media accounts for verification

Social media accounts for website registration is the easiest way which is convenient for users and secured for the store owners. The bots are not advanced enough to create a new social media account and use it for fake registrations. I recommend you to use social media signups on the website for the registration and login.

4. Use of the “Honeypot” technique

The honeypot technique requires adding a hidden field to the form. However, it is visible to bots and when they input the data to this field, the input to the hidden fields identify bots. The honeypot technique is fast and does not hinder the user experience of Magento 2 stores! Although its development and implementation require time.

5. Restrict fake registrations

Apart from the above methods, you can use Magento 2 Restrict Fake Registration to restrict fake registrations based on first name and last name character limits. It also helps restrict dummy sign-ups by restricting specified Email domains used to register. Also, the character length limit can be set for the first name and last name used to register as the bots have long machine-generated names.

The bots are here to stay, but luckily we’ve got these techniques to combat spams! Have you experienced spambots attack and problems caused by them? Do share if you have any new solution. It will be very valuable for all the readers.

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