For more than a year, Webflow's forum has been packed with complaints about the non-stop flow of SPAM through native Webflow forms.
It's a big, nagging problem for designers... and it's not the only problem with Webflow's forms handler either.
I'm about to show you how you can solve every one of those problems, for good, and make your Webflow-hosted site the efficient, gorgeous lead-generating machine it was always meant to be.
But I also want to discuss a crucial point that people often miss;
Basing a client's lead flow revenue entirely on email was never a great idea.
Where Webflow's native forms are behind the curve
Webflow is a design platform, and its forms design features are simple and straightforward. It's never pretended to be a comprehensive forms package, and it does not support features like multi-step forms, signatures, or payment capture.
Let's focus specifically on the problems surrounding form submission handling.
SPAM prevention, obviously
reCAPTCHA is supported, but;
- It's outdated at v2, which makes for a less elegant UX, and possibly lower-quality SPAM filtering
- reCAPTCHA doesn't seem to work with the direct gateway SPAM attacks
- No ability to make reCAPTCHA form-specific
- Submissions that are filtered as SPAM are not accessible to check for false-positives. Leads are money, so the ability to audit this is essential. For example, most SPAM filters would trigger when someone pastes a legit URL into their comment field.
Also,
- There are no honeypot or other traditional SPAM-prevention mechanics
Email Notifications
Recipients;
- No ability to specify different recipients for different forms.
- No ability to dynamically designate notification recipients from a list of verified recipients, e.g. Contact us, choose "support team", have the notification sent there.
- No ability to suppress notifications for a single form, like a newsletter enrol form.
Notification emails;
- Have a mandatory email unsubscribe link, which competes with the reply-to sender setting. This means that in the normal course of communications, end-users can easily and unintentionally unsubscribe the site owner from their own notifications.
- Have no special handling of checkboxes and radio buttons, which makes reading the notification emails difficult. 50 checkboxes = 50 true/false fields.
- Line breaks in multiline textarea inputs are not rendered, so leads are difficult to process.
- Are not brandable
End-user notification emails;
- No ability to send the form-filler a thank you message indicating that their information was received. That lack of acknowledgement can cause more confusion than you'd expect- and leads end-users to check competing site products and services since they're not sure if or when your site is actually working.
Ideally, the entire form submission and notification system needs an overhaul.
The Webflow team focuses on what they do best, which is to build a World-class page designer. But for the businesses who rely on Webflow-hosted sites...
The entire point of a website is to generate business, often in the form of leads, and the end product feels like a Ferrari with wooden wheels.
Fortunately, there are dozens of solid solutions out there, and they're not expensive or difficult to integrate.
But before you choose one...
Re-think your moneypipe
At the opening of this article I made a comment;
Basing a client's lead flow revenue entirely on email was never a great idea.
This observation comes from some hard won experience.
Email has always been unreliable and insecure.
SPAM blockers at the inbox-end fail all the time. I've lost tons of legitimate leads to both Google's and Outlook 365's SPAM filters.
There is a better approach.
I think of building sites as building a moneypipe.
I'm never comfortable with it being unreliable, untestable, difficult to debug, difficult to measure conversions. After all, the moneypipe is the whole point of the site.
Several years ago I faced the same problems- SPAM, unsubscribe issues, difficult-to-process lead notifications- and I pivoted Sygnal away from an email-centric capture strategy to more robust solutions.
These fall into two categories;
3rd party form-submission-handlers;
- Lead-specific capture to sales-force automation platforms like Hubspot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Nutshell, etc.
- General forms capture to 3rd party form submission handlers like Basin or Formspark.
- Automation + capture into generic databases like Airtable or Google Sheets.
3rd party form handlers, which replace the form UX as well;
- e.g. Jotform, which support multi-step forms, signatures, payment, HIPAA compliance, 3rd party integrations, and much more
A better mousetrap
Over the past year, Webflow has been making moves to improve its hosting platform in a big way through support for apps, which make it easier to integrate 3rd party solutions directly into your site.
Why do this?
Because any time a problem is significant enough to spawn an entire industry of solutions, it's because it's a difficult and expensive problem to solve, and it's probably not worth Webflow trying to solve.
Complex multi-step forms, form logic, secure data capture, and SPAM handling are such a problem.
The rise of Webflow apps
There are now a ton of integration options, from Hubspot to Basin to Formspark and many others, designed specifically to make lead capture work more reliably and to mitigate SPAM issues.
Yes, some of these will cost money and increase your hosting bill, so here's another reframe;
Modern websites don't operate in isolation. The moment you get past "hello world" and some pretty art, you are building a system- and a system will have multiple services from different vendors as part of the final solution.
Wordpress users are very familiar with this. You build the base site in WP, and then you use the plug-in store for every conceivable thing from SEO to lead capture to e-commerce.
This is important to call out, because for a lot of new Webflow users, there's an unhelpful expectation that Webflow can ( and should ) meet every conceivable need you have in your system build.
Even if it were possible, that level of development, infrastructure and support cost would just raise the cost of running Webflow overall.
In the end, you'll pay either way.
At least this way, you can scale your site gradually, and you have a much wider range of options to choose from for each project's needs.
Integrating your own solution
I haven't researched every possibility, there are just far too many. However, here are some great resources to start with.
Form submission handlers
Sygnal uses Basin for form handling because we like its versatility and flexibility.
It lets us use Webflow-designed forms with a robust back end that perfectly meets the needs of 95% of our projects. It's cheap and efficient, because you can use one account to serve multiple client sites. Moreover, you can use Webflow's built-in success, error, and redirect handlers with our SA5 attributes lib.
Here's our step-by-step guide on how to integrate Basin.
Honestly, once we found Basin, we stopped looking and spent our time working on other problem, however for some of you, it might not be the perfect solution, so-
Formspark offers free submission capture capabilities, and paired with Botpoison you get a good, low-cost framework to work with. Check out Mike Pecha's youtube for videos on how to integrate these with Webflow.
Webflow-app-based solutions are a good path to investigate as well. One which I haven't tested but looks highly versatile is Form Connector.
Full form builders
If you have more complex forms needs like;
- Multi-step forms
- Complex flow logic
- Complex forms validation
- Complex security requirements like HIPAA
- The need for clients to be able to modify the forms, themselves
Then you probably want a full drop-in forms replacement.
One of my favorites is Jotforms due to its huge range of capabilities- every one of the above items is supported, and many more.
Also check out Incognito forms.
Check Webflow's forms integrations page which contains many other solutions.
And a few promising looking apps-
- App - https://webflow.com/apps/detail/flow-form
- App - https://webflow.com/apps/detail/form-fields-pro
I'll add more here when I can.
Add your own favorites in the discussion below.
