Bot spam isn’t just an annoyance – it can inflate your analytics, waste admin hours, clog your email inbox, and cost you money. Whether you’re running a sleek portfolio site on Webflow or managing a feature-rich Shopify store, your business is a target. And unfortunately, bots don’t discriminate. If your site has open forms, account creation, or a checkout process, then you’re at risk.

The good news is that bots follow patterns and those patterns can be blocked.

In this post, we’ll walk through the three most common points of attack: Contact Forms, Account Creation, and Checkout. For each, we’ll explain what the issue looks like, why it matters, and offer effective, platform-specific solutions for Webflow and Shopify.

1. Contact Form Spam: The #1 Entry Point for Bots

Contact form spam is the most common type of bot activity because it’s the easiest door to walk through. All a bot has to do is find a form on your site, fill it out with junk (or worse, phishing links), and submit. Suddenly, your inbox is flooded with messages about crypto investments, sketchy marketing tools, fake domain renewals, and other garbage. On top of that, bots may attempt to exploit these forms to probe your site for vulnerabilities.

If you’re using tools like Webflow’s built-in form notification system or have forms wired to your CRM, your team may waste hours reviewing irrelevant or malicious submissions. We've seen clients who went from receiving 2–3 qualified inquiries per day to sorting through 50+ spam messages. It slows down response time, clutters lead management, and can even hurt customer trust when genuine messages go unnoticed.

Solutions (Webflow & Shopify):

• Time-Based Restrictions: Add logic that prevents form submission within a certain number of seconds after a page is loaded. Bots can fill and submit forms instantly; humans can’t. If someone submits a form 0.4 seconds after page load, you know it’s a bot.
• Adding CAPTCHA Test to Forms: A CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is a test designed to distinguish between human users and automated bots on websites. It typically involves identifying and typing distorted text or selecting specific images from a set. Google’s reCAPTCHA v3 runs this test automatically without any user friction. By adding a CAPTCHA to a contact form, you can weed-out the bulk of bot submissions. 
• Deindex Form Pages: Make sure search engines and web crawlers can’t find your form pages by accident. Use robots.txt rules, meta noindex tags, and nofollow on any internal links to these forms. Some bots rely on indexed pages to identify targets.

It’s worth noting that Shopify and Webflow both have antibot and spam settings you can activate in the backend where they help filter out bad submissions for you.

Honeypot Fields (Advanced, but Effective):

Honeypots are one of our favorite non-intrusive spam prevention tactics. Here's how it works:

1. Add a field to your form with a label like "Last Name" or "Phone Extension."
   
   
2. Hide it using CSS (display:none) instead of a type="hidden" field, which bots tend to skip.
   
   
3. On the backend, reject any form submission where that field has a value.
   
   

Almost every spam bot will fill in the honeypot field, flagging itself in the process. Adding just one honeypot field can eliminate  over 95% of contact form spam.

You can layer this with keyword filtering (e.g., discard messages that mention "work from home", "crypto", or "domain renewal") or temporarily blacklist IPs that submit multiple suspicious entries. If you tend to receive spam with the same messages, then applying keyword filtering can go a long way.

2. Spam Account Creation: Newsletters & Store Profiles

While contact form spam is obvious, spam account creation is a more subtle but equally dangerous problem. Bots will hit your signup forms and create hundreds, even thousands, of fake accounts using disposable email addresses. On the surface, it may look like your user base is growing, but what you're actually seeing is data pollution.

If you integrate with Klaviyo, Mailchimp, or another email marketing platform, these fake accounts can balloon your subscriber list. And since many of these platforms charge you per contact, spam can quite literally cost you money. We've seen brands get hit with unexpected increases in their email software costs because of a surge in bot-created accounts.

Not to mention, bot accounts muddy your analytics. You can't segment your list properly if it's 40% garbage. Worse, if you run automated email flows to these fake accounts, you risk damaging your domain's sender reputation and landing on email blacklists.

Solutions:

• Email Confirmation: Require users to confirm their email address before they can access their account or receive marketing emails. This stops most bots cold, since they rarely check disposable inboxes. Most email marketing software offer this feature to be enabled with just a click in your settings.
• Rate-Limiting by IP: Add logic to limit how many new accounts can be created by a single IP address per day or hour. It won’t catch VPN-hopping bots, but it’ll stop low-effort attacks. There are a variety of Shopify apps that will handle this for you and filter out bad actors by IP address.
• CAPTCHAs and Behavioral Analysis: Google reCAPTCHA or Friendly Captcha tools analyze mouse movements, time on page, and other human behavior patterns. While captchas can slightly lower UX, it's often worth the tradeoff if you're experiencing major bot problems.
• Manual Review for High-Volume or Suspicious Signups: Especially relevant for B2B sites, this involves holding accounts in a pending state until approved.

Some Shopify 2.0 themes included an "Address Update" page template that wasn’t protected behind account login. Bots would find this page and submit fake addresses, often bypassing signup entirely. We’ve helped clients remove or hide this page in their theme files to stop the abuse.

Platform-Specific Tips:

• Webflow: If you're using Memberstack, Outseta, or Webflow Memberships, check their bot prevention tools or add a double opt-in via email.
• Shopify: Lock down account settings in your admin. Only allow accounts to be created during checkout (if necessary), and consider disabling accounts altogether if they aren’t mission-critical. 

3. Spam Checkouts: When Bots Start "Buying"

This one sounds strange, but it's very real. Bots will sometimes discover $0 products or free promotional items in your store and place thousands of fake orders. These may be hidden loyalty rewards or freebie products that aren’t linked from the main navigation but still publicly accessible via URL.

Bots are trained to crawl ecommerce sites, sniff out any products with no price, and exploit them. This results in fake orders that bog down your fulfillment team, flood your email automation with false confirmations, and bloat your sales analytics. One of our Shopify clients received over 1,000 bogus orders in a single weekend—all with shipping info to random addresses.

And it doesn’t stop there. Bots can also abuse discount codes and checkout flows, triggering email sequences for abandoned carts, draining your marketing bandwidth, and even costing money in SMS charges.

Solutions:

• Avoid $0 Products: Even if you're giving something away, set the price to $0.01. That penny is often enough to deter bots, which are optimized to find and exploit zero-cost products.
• Enable Bot Filtering: Shopify has rolled out bot detection tools and apps that help filter fake checkouts.
• Monitor Abandoned Checkout Activity: Fake abandoned carts are another red flag. If you see hundreds of abandoned checkouts from similar IP addresses or all to the same geographic region, it’s time to investigate.
• Use Cloudflare: You can block known bad bots or throttle excessive checkout activity using Cloudflare’s rules engine. Cloudflare (among other tools) offer comprehensive bot protection software that can be plug-and-play.

Platform-Specific Tips:

• Webflow: Webflow Ecommerce users should consider hiding promo-only products behind gated or password-protected links.
• Shopify: The Shopify app store is filled with third-party apps like Clean Up Abandoned Checkouts or Bot Protection Pro that can make a big difference with little effort.

Don’t Let the Bots Win

Bot spam might seem like a nuisance you can just ignore, but it can snowball into a serious liability if left unchecked. From inflated email list charges to skewed conversion rates and operational inefficiencies, bots can eat away at your business from multiple angles.

The key is prevention. Once bots start attacking, you’re playing catch-up. But a few hours of proactive implementation can save you thousands of dollars and hundreds of wasted hours.

While some of the tools and techniques mentioned here are simple to implement, the continued troubleshooting until something works can be exhausting. If you need a helping hand in your fight against bots, then please don’t hesitate to schedule a meeting with us here.

In addition to building custom Webflow and Shopify websites, at H1 Web Development we help ensure that from a technical perspective our clients’ sites are operating smoothly. And this includes stamping out bots.

You don’t have to “just put up with bots.” Schedule a call with us today, and let’s build a bot-free future for your site.