welp, im learning alot every day and trying to improve my store, my email is getting hit by alot of bots basically a few each day, seems like auto form fillers, tried to install a blocker app from shopify (formsentry) but its not catching them at all.
Aside from the bot spam, im curious as to what most think, its not perfect in my eyes yet but I am working on it daily, www.backtothebranch.com not sure how my sitemap/seo is doing either and could use advice, im uploading inventory daily preparing for a marketing storm on socials.
Curious as to how the pros solve these challenges, any advice and critique is welcome
Getting inventory and systems lined up is good progress. Most stores have multiple layers of protection to prevent bot spam on forms these days, implement Google reCAPTCHA or hCaptcha on all contact and newsletter forms, add a hidden honeypot field, and limit submissions per IP through Shopify apps that have throttling. Perhaps consider using Shopify Forms or Klaviyo forms as they provide better filtering when handling large volumes. You may want to consider using Shopify Forms, or Klaviyo forms as these have better filtering when dealing with large volumes. For seo make sure sitemap is submitted in google search console product pages with unique titles and meta description and collection are well structured with internal linking. Consistent content posting and clean navigation matter more than frequent inventory uploads alone in general.
Heads up first, the community gets flooded with posts daily and not all of them get answered. If yours sinks, just reply to your own thread to bump it back up, that’s the way it works here.
For the bot spam: FormSentry isn’t catching them probably because most form bots now bypass simple JS based blockers. Better stack is to enable Shopify’s built in hCaptcha (Settings > Checkout and accounts > scroll to spam protection, turn it on for contact and account forms), plus add a honeypot field to your contact form. Honeypot is a hidden input bots auto fill but humans never see, then you discard any submission where it’s filled. If your theme dev tools allow it, that’s a 5 minute fix and stops 90% of dumb bots.
For the smarter ones, Cloudflare Turnstile in front of your forms is the most effective free option. Also, switch your contact email from a generic one (info, contact) to something less scrapeable, generic addresses get hit way harder.
