Spam registrations can degrade the performance of your website, both for you and your customers. Heavy website traffic due to bot activities can reduce website load speed, impacting the experience of your genuine customers.
Spam customer profiles can hinder your marketing campaigns and even finish your marketing budget quickly.
It will also give you wrong analytics data, creating a hazy picture of your product’s demand in the market. That’s why you must stop spam registrations for your e-commerce store.
This blog post will guide you through ways to prevent spam accounts in Magento 2.
Table of Contents
- Methods to Avoid Spam Registrations
- How to Stop Spam Registrations in Magento 2?
- Easily Protect Your Store from Spammers
Methods to Avoid Spam Registrations
1. Google ReCaptcha
Google ReCAPTCHA distinguishes between human users and bots. It prevents bots from submitting spam registrations and restricts other automated attacks by user activity prompts or advanced algorithms.
Add the first layer of security to your Magento 2 store with Google ReCAPTCHA. To enable Google ReCAPTCHA for website visitors, follow the path: Stores > Settings > Configuration > Security > Google reCAPTCHA storefront.
2. OTP Verification
Gone are the days when we used to verify our new user account on any website with the link received on the mail account.
As mobile phones became handier, OTP verification became a much easier and widely used account verification method. OTP not only helps in account verification but also helps misuse account login credentials, even if spammers get access to them otherwise.
You can use both SMS and WhatsApp messenger to enable OTP verification for your users. For SMS verification, you can integrate Magento 2 SMS notification extension into your Magento store.
However, these days, e-commerce businesses are largely relying on WhatsApp Messenger to stay connected with their customers. By integrating Magento 2 WhatsApp notification extension into your online store, you enable OTP verification for your customers and keep them posted about their shopping activities.
3. Social Login
Simplify account setup for your customers, enabling a social login feature for your Magento 2 store. Though this feature is unavailable by default, you can check our Magento 2 Social Login extension to unlock the social login features.
Once the extension is configured for your store, you can select from 30+ social platforms (Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and many more) to let your customers sign up using their social accounts.
Social login not only fastens the account creation process for your customers but also reduces spam/bot registrations on your Magento 2 store.
4. “Honeypot” Technique
Another effective method to stop customer registration spam is the “Honeypot” technique.
In contrast to CAPTCHA, “Honeypot” challenges bots by tricking them. It involves adding a hidden field to the forms or customer login fields that are not visible to human users. However, if bots fill out these forms, they will see and update those fields, making it easier to identify bot activities in your store.
Implementing this technique can enhance your strategy to prevent spam accounts in Magento 2. You will need the assistance of a Magento developer to implement the “Honeypot technique” in your store.
Implementing email restrictions can be an effective strategy to stop Magento 2 customer registration spam.
You can restrict access to known spammy domains or temporary email services. Moreover, you can also add restrictions to expressions used in email addresses to avoid bot-generated emails.
5. Email Restrictions
Implementing email restrictions can be an effective strategy to stop Magento 2 customer registration spam.
You can restrict access to known spammy domains or temporary email services. Moreover, you can also add restrictions to expressions used in email addresses to avoid bot-generated emails.
Restricting the number of account creations per IP address within a timeframe can also be an actionable step to minimize Magento 2 fake account creation. Implementing email restrictions can significantly reduce the number of fake customer account registrations for your Magento 2 store.
How to Stop Spam Registrations in Magento 2?
You might have seen longer strings of names in spam user accounts, but now you can restrict such account creations at your Magento 2 store.
Meetanshi’s Magento 2 Restrict Fake Registration extension can help you prevent spam accounts in Magento 2.
Key Features:
- It lets you implement email restrictions based on TLDs
- Apply first name and last name character limits for user’s names
- Enable Google reCaptcha to avoid spam account creations
Step 1: Install the Extension
Download and upload the extension to the backend to install it. Once installed, you can configure the extension from Magento’s admin panel.
Go to Stores > Settings > Configuration > Meetanshi > Restrict Fake Registration. Here, select “Enable” from the dropdown option.
Step 2: Blacklist Email Domains
In the restriction email domains section, you can list all the domains or temporary email service providers you want to restrict access.
Here, you can set the character limit for the first name and last name of the user to avoid lengthy user names created by bots/spammers.
Step 3: Set up Google reCaptcha
Select “Enable” from the dropdown option to allow Google reCAPTCHA on the customer sign-in page.
If you are not registered with Google reCAPTCHA, create an account to register and get the site key. Once you get your site and secret key, copy it from Google reCAPTCHA’s site and paste it here.
Once done, click ‘Save‘ and don’t forget to flush the cache. You can check the implementation on the sign-up page of your Magento 2 store.
Easily Protect Your Store from Spammers
Keep unwanted intruders away from your Magento 2 store with the Meetanshi Magento 2 Restrict Fake Registration extension. You’ve read about the multiple tactics you can use to avoid spam in Magento 2 customer registration. You can implement more than one of these methods at a time to ensure you don’t leave a door open for spammers or bots.
