🚫 Stop Adding Friction to Your Forms Just to Block Bots

**🚫 Stop Adding Friction to Your Forms Just to Block Bots**

On Wednesday I presented some CRO tips at the "B2B Acceleration Stage" at Online Retailer. One idea that got a surprising number of nods - and a few phones lifted for photos - was this:

👉 Instead of using CAPTCHA, try a "honeypot" field.

What’s a honeypot?
🐝 It’s a sneaky, hidden form field that real users never see… but bots do.

And if a bot fills it out?
Boom. Button disabled and spam blocked.

- No “click the traffic lights.”
- No “find the motorbikes”.
- No grade 1 maths problems
- No "tick if you are human"

Just clean forms and a smoother user experience.

Why it works:
✅ Most spam bots fill out every field
✅ Humans never see the honeypot
✅ You can block junk leads without annoying legit users

A few best practices though:
🔹 Hide it with CSS (not type="hidden")
🔹 Use boring names like fax_number
🔹 If the field gets filled - don’t submit the form
🔹 Combine with light filters (e.g. time delay, domain check) for extra protection

It’s not bulletproof (is anything?) - smarter bots may dodge it - but it’s a great first line of defence.

And it won’t tank your form conversion rate like CAPTCHA can.

If you're running B2B lead gen (or honestly any contact form) and haven't tested this yet, it's worth a look.

🧠 Smart UX > Clunky security.

Has anyone else quietly deployed honeypots? Or found other clever ways to cut spam without killing the user journey?

hashtag#CRO hashtag#FormOptimisation hashtag#B2BMarketing hashtag#NoMoreCAPTCHA hashtag#HoneypotField