How to add captcha in contact form 7 WordPress

At some point, you may have come across a form that asks you to prove you’re not a robot by solving a simple puzzle or typing in a few characters. That’s a CAPTCHA, and it’s a great way to prevent spam and abuse on your website. If you’re using Contact Form 7 on WordPress, you may wonder how to add a CAPTCHA to your forms. In this guide, we’ll walk you through the process step-by-step.

It is a popular WordPress plugin for creating and managing website contact forms. It’s a free and easy-to-use plugin that allows website owners to create custom forms with fields for various information like name, email, phone number, and message. Contact Form 7 is flexible and can be customized to fit the design of any website. It also has various features like file uploads, email notifications, and CAPTCHA to prevent spam. Get to know about Third Time Lucky: How We Conquered WordPress.

The plugins for creating custom forms on WordPress websites. However, its popularity has made it a prime target for spam attacks. Automated bots can quickly fill out and submit documents, which can cause various issues for website owners. The most common problems include the following:

• Receiving spam emails.
• Having the website’s resources drained.
• Losing potential customers due to a poor user experience.

Adding Captcha to Contact Form 7 can help mitigate these issues. Captcha provides an additional layer of security by ensuring that the form fills by a human and not a bot. It helps prevent spam attacks and ensures that only legitimate leads are being generated from the state.

Adding Captcha in Contact Form 7 Benefits

Reduces Spam

One of the most significant benefits of adding Captcha to Contact Form 7 is that it helps reduce spam. Captcha can differentiate between humans and machines and only allow human submissions. Automated bots cannot fill out the form and spam your inbox.

Improves User Experience

Another benefit of add captcha in contact form 7 WordPress is that it can improve the user experience. Users often need to be put off by lengthy forms and spam emails. Captcha reduces the chances of receiving spam emails, leading to a better user experience.

Protects Website Resources

Automated bots can use up website resources and cause website crashes. Captcha helps reduce the chances of these attacks by preventing bots from submitting forms. It ensures that your website resources are used for legitimate purposes only.

Generates Legitimate Leads

Adding Captcha to Contact Form 7 ensures that the leads generated from the form are legitimate. It helps ensure that your sales team is not wasting time on spam leads and can focus on converting genuine leads into customers.

Step 1: Install the Contact Form 7 Plugin

Before adding a CAPTCHA to Contact Form 7, we need to ensure the plugin is installed and activated on our WordPress site. If you’re not already using Contact Form 7, you can download and install it from the WordPress plugin repository.

Step 2: Install and Activate the reCAPTCHA Plugin

reCAPTCHA is a free service that protect websites from spam and abuse. To use reCAPTCHA with Contact Form 7, we’ll install and activate Contact Form 7 reCAPTCHA plugin.

Go to Plugins > Add New in your WordPress dashboard to install the plugin. Search for “Contact Form 7 reCAPTCHA” and install the plugin that appears. Once the plugin is installed, activate it.

Step 3: Get Your reCAPTCHA API Keys

To use reCAPTCHA, you’ll need to get a set of API keys from Google. To do this, go to the reCAPTCHA website and create an account. Once you’ve signed up, you’ll be taken to a page to register a new site.

Fill in the required fields and select the reCAPTCHA v3 option. Then, click the “Submit” button to create your new site. On the next page, you’ll see your site and secret keys. Please note these keys, as we’ll need them in the next step.

Step 4: Configure Contact Form 7 to Use reCAPTCHA

Now that we have our API keys, we can configure Contact Form 7 to use reCAPTCHA. To do this, go to Contact > Integration in your WordPress dashboard.

Under the reCAPTCHA section, click the “Setup Integration” button. Enter your site key and secret key on the next page in the appropriate fields. You can also choose which pages to enable reCAPTCHA on and set the reCAPTCHA badge position.

Once you’ve entered your keys and configured your settings, click the “Save Changes” button to apply your changes.

Step 5: Add the reCAPTCHA short code to Your Form

Now that we’ve configured Contact Form 7 to use reCAPTCHA, we need to add the reCAPTCHA short code to our form. Go to Contact > Contact Forms in your WordPress dashboard to do this.

Open the form to which you want to add the reCAPTCHA, and find the “Form” tab. In the form editor, add the following short code where you want the reCAPTCHA to appear:

Customizing Captcha in Contact Form 7

Customizing the Captcha in Contact Form 7 is a great way to ensure that it matches the design of your website. Contact Form 7 offers various styling options for Captcha, such as changing the color and font size. To customize the Captcha, go to the Contact Form 7 settings and click the “reCAPTCHA” tab. From there, you can select the styling options that you prefer. You can also customize the language of the Captcha to match the language of your website. Contact Form 7 offers various languages, including English, Spanish, French, and German. By customizing the Captcha in Contact Form 7, you can ensure that it prevents spam and looks great on your website.

Testing Contact Form 7 with Captcha

According to the official Contact Form 7 website, the newest version the reCAPTCHA API is v3, and Contact Form 7 5.1 and later use this reCAPTCHA v3 API. It allows to block abusive form submissions by spambots. reCAPTCHA v3 works in the background. Users will not see the traditional “I’m not a robot” checkbox.

If you’re using WordPress and want to add reCAPTCHA to Contact Form 7, the following steps can help you achieve this:

1. Obtain the reCAPTCHA site key and secret key.
2. Integrate reCAPTCHA with Contact Form 7.
3. Configure your default contact form.
4. Insert the contact form into a WordPress page.

It is worth noting that Contact Form 7 recommends using reCAPTCHA instead of Simple CAPTCHA to prevent bots from submitting forms. Contact Form 7 4.3 and later versions recommend reCAPTCHA over Really Simple CAPTCHA.