How to Add Captcha to Contact Form 7? Beginners Guide
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Contact form 7 is an amazing plugin itself but you can integrate captcha to protect your contact form from abuse and spam. CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. It is a trade product of Google.
Most often you might receive spam posts via your form. These spams are sent through “bots” which are coded in such a way that it always proceeds to search for forms over the internet. Google detects the user interaction process to determine if it is a bot or human. Contact form lets you protect your form through google reCAPTCHA. You can use one captcha to protect multiple forms also. It is easy to use, free and lightweight.
A contact us page is a mandatory page for any website. The contact page is a useful page for communicating quickly with the website admin or owner. Also, It increases website trustworthiness. Also, we use a captcha feature in contact form due to many reasons.
So in this post, we will share the best guide on how to add Captcha to contact form 7 without applying any coding knowledge.
What is Captcha?
Captcha is a spam protection service. There are many captcha service providers, but one of the best is Google-captcha, which supports most of the popular plugins. The working process of Google captcha is straightforward. When someone is going to contact you using the website’s contact us form, they need to solve the Captcha formula, or some version of reCAPTCHA works silently to prevent automated spambots.
Why should you use Captcha in a Contact form?
You already know Captcha has been used for spam protection. Many people use automated software to contact site owners or apply automated/spammy marketing techniques using the contact form. All automated messages are spam, which harmful for our website. So to prevent automated submission by spambots, we can use Captcha in a contact form.
How to add a captcha feature in contact form 7: Sep by step guide
reCAPTCHA Compatibility with Contact form 7
Version over 5.1 of contact form 7 supports reCAPTCHA v3 and does not support v2. If you want to use v2 with the latest contact form 7 version, you can install another plugin named “Contact Form 7-reCAPTCHA v2” along with contact form 7.
Using the captcha feature in contact form 7 is very easy. First of all, you have to log in to the Google-captcha service with your Gmail account.
So let’s step by step guide.
Go to Google reCAPTCHA page and click on the “Admin Console” button located top right corner of the active window.
Now you have to register a new site in Google ReCaptcha service. So enter your ReCaptcha level name which will help you to identify level in future. In this level section, you can use your site name then select reCAPTCHA type V3.
Now enter your website name correctly then Accept the reCAPTCHA Terms of Service and finally click on the ‘Submit’ button.
Next step, you will get site key and secret key both you can use in your contact us seven or WPfrom plugin to enable the Captcha feature.
Now time is to setup reCAPTCHA code to your contact form plugin. So go to the WordPress admin dashboard then click on the ‘Integration’ section of the Contact form 7 plugin.
After that, click on the ‘Setup Integration’ option of the reCAPTCHA feature. Then you will get two new boxes to enter Google reCAPTCHA site key and secret key. So enter them to the appropriate box.
Then finally click on the ‘Save Changes‘ button. Now you are done. From this time, the newly enabled reCAPTCHA feature will protect you against spam and other types of automated abuse.
Is it Harmful for Web Page Loading Speed?
Truly speaking that the reCaptcha feature must increase website load time that is harmful for website SEO and overall user experience.
Before using Google reCaptcha in our site’s contact form at WPBasic Pro, our website page load time was around 1.40 to 1.80. We have used the Gift of speed tool which is good enough for checking web page loading time.
On the other hand, after using the reCaptcha feature in our Contact form 7 plugin, it dramatically increased over 2.00 that is so sad and negative result for us.
However, you can check your web page loading time after using reCaptcha codes in your Contact form 7 plugin.
How to solve slow page loading?
The tip is to use a web performance plugin along with a caching plugin. We will recommend using the Perfmatters, which is the best for increasing website page loading speed and gives you the best performance results all the time without losing any fatal error.
Finlay, if you get so many spam messages, you should enable the reCaptcha feature. Otherwise not. In that case, you may face, slow web page loading issue that is another thing. So to solve slow page loading, use a good web page performance plugin.
Security of your site is a key concern of your business. Let reCAPTCHA secure your site from “ bot “ Stay secure from spam and abuse.
