reCAPTCHA v2, v3, & invisible reCAPTCHA in 2023 [The Complete Guide]

In this article, you will learn how to add reCAPTCHA to Contact Form 7. You can add both reCAPTCHA v3 and reCAPTCHA v2 to Contact Form 7.

WordPress Contact Form 7 Spam

Spamming is a big problem if you have Contact Form 7 plugin in your WordPress site. In order to stop spam and block spam bots from using your Contact Form 7 forms,  you have to add Contact Form 7 reCAPTCHA.

Adding reCAPTCHA to your WordPress contact form protects your website from fraud & abuse. reCAPTCHA helps you stop spam bots and other automated attacks while approving valid users to submit form entries.
Contact Form 7 plugin is a popular WordPress form plugin to create contact forms in WordPress. So in this post we will see how to add reCAPTCHA to Contact Form 7 plugin.

Contact Form 7 reCAPTCHA:

Contact Form 7 (CF7) plugin by default supports Google reCAPTCHA, so you don’t need any other additional plugins for reCAPTCHA. CF7 officially supports reCAPTCHA v3 which invisible to users and does not interrupt user experience.

reCAPTCHA v3 does not require any actions from users but automatically sets scores by working in the background your Contact Form 7 forms will be protected by the invisible reCAPTCHA.

There is also the reCAPTCHA v2 which is available. It verifies if an interaction is legitimate with the “I am not a robot” checkbox and with invisible reCAPTCHA badge challenges. If you want to add reCAPTCHA v2 to your Contact Form 7 forms you would need an additional add-on. We will also cover adding reCAPTCHA v2 in this post.

Whether its v3 or v2, in order to add reCAPTCHA to Contact Form 7 you first need to generate API keys for the reCAPTCHA. To do this login to Google reCAPTCHA.

Tablesome – Contact Form 7 Automation plugin

If you are using Contact Form 7 plugin you know that tough its features are good, but they are very limited. You have to use CF7 addon plugins to extend even the basic features such as saving Contact Form 7 form submissions to database.

You could install Tablesome, as it is an All-In-One solution for extending Contact Form 7. You can easily save Contact Form 7 messages and do other Contact Form 7 automations with the free Tablesome plugin.

Also See: How to save Contact Form 7 submissions to database

How to generate Google reCAPTCHA keys?

1. Go to Google reCAPTCHA site using this link – https://www.google.com/recaptcha/about/
   
2. Here, click on “v3 Admin Console”
3. If you have a Gmail account use it to login to Google reCAPTCHA. If you don’t create a new Gmail account and use it to login to Google reCAPTCHA.
4. After logging into Google reCAPTCHA admin console, which looks like the image below:
   
5. In the reCAPTCHA Console you will have a set of buttons on the top right corner
6. Click the “Plus” button to register a new site for Google reCAPTCHA.
   
7. In the Label field add the domain name of your site
8. Then, select the reCAPTCHA version you want to create, you can choose reCAPTCHA v3 or reCAPTCHA v2. Choose the correct version, because if you want to change reCAPTCHA version later, you have to add it as another site.
9. If you choose reCAPTCHA v3, not additional options are required
10. If you choose reCAPTCHA v2, you will be asked further to choose between 3 options.
    
11. For Contact Form 7 you can choose to have the ‘Checkbox’ or Invisible reCAPTCHA
12. Then add your domain in the domain field and click Submit.
13. Now the reCAPTCHA API keys will be generated for your site. We have to add these keys to Contact Form 7.

Adding reCPATCHA (v3) Keys to Contact Form 7

To add the reCAPTCHA keys, go back to your WordPress dashboard and then,

1. Install and activate Contact Form 7. (Skip this step if you already have installed Contact Form 7 plugin)
2. In the dashboard menu in the sidebar and go to Contact → Integration
3. In the Integration page you would find many different integrations. Here find reCAPTCHA  integration and then click “Setup Integration”
   
4. It will take you to a page that asks for your Site key and Secret key
5. Now go to the Google reCAPTCHA console and copy the reCAPTCHA keys that you have just generated and paste it on the integration page and click Save Changes.

reCAPTCHA Badge

A small reCAPTCHA badge like the image displayed above will appear at the bottom right of each page, if the reCAPTCHA v3 is working correctly on your site. This badge is added to inform the site visitors that they are tracked by Google and it provides links to reCAPTCHA’s privacy policy.

If you don’t like this badge being displayed on your site, Google permits you to hide the reCAPTCHA badge but you have to add reCAPTCHA’s privacy policy to your site’s privacy policy.
To hide this you have to add Custom CSS like the one displayed below.

.grecaptcha-badge { 
    visibility: hidden;
}

reCAPTCHA v3 is allowing spam. What to do?

If reCAPTCHA v3 is not working and you are still getting spam messages in your Contact Form 7, you can still go back to reCAPTCHA v2 which requires an “I’m not a robot” checkbox validation to stop spam bots.

How to add reCAPTCHA v2 to Contact Form 7?

If you want to have a check in which users can click “I am not a robot”, you would need to add reCAPTCHA v2.

Since Contact Form 7 does not support, you have to install an add-on called ReCaptcha v2 for Contact Form 7 which is a contact form 7 anti spam plugin. After installing it will add an option to Contact Form 7’s dashboard menu named as “reCAPTCHA version”.

• • Click this option and it will open a page that looks like the image below.
    

• In the field named “Select reCaptcha Usage” select the option ‘reCPATCHA Version 2’ and in the reCaptcha Source, you can leave it as ‘google.com’.
• If you are living in a country where the default www.google.com server is restricted, you can make use of www.recaptcha.net server as an alternative that Google reCAPTCHA provides.