Verify Your Site & Show Its URL on Your Forms

When submitting online forms, users often include personal information such as their name and email address. When doing so, they need to trust they are disclosing their personal data to the person or organization they intend to.

Increase user confidence and form conversions by letting us verify you own the websites you use with FormSmarts. FormSmarts will then display your verified form owner name on your forms.

Example: You have built a form with the return URL http://www.example.com/thankyou.html. Once we have verified you own www.example.com, we'll be able to display a notice on that form saying that the form's data recipient is www.example.com.

How to Verify Your Site

To verify your sites, sign in to FormSmarts, and choose the Websites option in the Settings tab of the form builder.

As part of the verification process, you will be asked to create a file on your web server. Do not remove that file after your site has been verified. FormSmarts will check from time to time if the file is still there.

If you experience difficulties verifying your site, read the FAQ below. If that doesn't help you complete verification, try DNS Verification.

Your server doesn't return a 404 "Not Found" error when expected

To verify a website, FormSmarts checks that:

1. you have placed a file with the appropriate name in the root folder of your website
2. requesting a non-existing file on your site returns a 404 "Not Found" error

Web standards require that a server returns a 404 "Not Found" error when a user requests a page that doesn't exist. Some hosts set up their servers to behave differently and verification will fail if this applies to you. Please use DNS Verification instead.

Your site URL is a redirection to another URL

When checking http://www.example.com/, we expect to find the verification file exactly at that URL, not at http://example.com/ or http://mysite.example.com/. FormSmarts robot doesn't follow redirects.

You created a file with an incorrect name or location

• you used a .htm file extension instead of .html
• the filename is incorrect
• you placed the file at the wrong location on your server

Some web host (e.g. Wix) don't allow their members to create pages with a .html extension. If you are in this situation, you should still be able to verify your site with DNS Verification.

Is site verification required to create online forms?

No, form owner verification is not required, but recommended. You can create fully functional online forms without verifying your site, but you won't be able to display your site name or logo on your forms.

My website is at http://example.com/ex/ but I am asked to verify http://example.com/

For verification purposes, we only consider as a website:

• domain names (i.e. example.com)
• hostnames (i.e. www.example.com, mysite.example.com)

That is because we may use your site URL as the owner of your form. If your website is in a sub-folder like example.com/mysite/, we won't be able to verify the ownership of your website.

FormSmarts members can also verify their site by adding a record to its DNS.

1. Log in to the DNS admin console for your domain name. The organization managing your DNS is usually your web host or domain name registrar. Large organizations host their own DNS or rely on a specialized provider.
2. Create a new DNS record
3. Select TXT as the record type
4. Under DNS Name, enter _formsmarts.www. This assumes your site's URL starts with www. If your site uses the root domain (apex) i.e. example.com instead of www.example.com, enter _formsmarts as the DNS Name.
5. Copy your Site Verification Code from the Settings Tab of the form builder. If the form builder asks your to create a file named formsmarts-857ea2e039c4f0ed.html, your verification code is 857ea2e039c4f0ed
6. Paste the Site Verification Code enclosed in quotes under Value: e.g. "857ea2e039c4f0ed"
7. If you're asked to provide a Time to Live (TTL), enter 300 (5 minutes).
8. Once you've updated your DNS, click on Verify Site in the Settings Tab of the form builder.

Do not remove the DNS record once your site has been verified.

If you enter incorrect information and need to modify the TXT record after you've added it, wait 5 to 15 minutes for DNS changes to propagate over the internet then click on Verify Site again.

Example DNS Configuration

The generic DNS zone below shows how the FormSmarts site verification TXT record should appear¹ in the DNS for your domain.

Type	Name	Value
A	@	52.202.250.19
A	www	52.202.250.19
TXT	_formsmarts.www	"857ea2e039c4f0ed"
NS	@	ns1.example.net
NS	@	ns2.example.net
MX	@	mx1.example.net
MX	@	mx2.example.net
SOA	@	hostmaster.example.com. 1 21600 3600 259200 300

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1. Time to Live (TTL) omitted for clarify.