Put CAPTCHA in WordPress to all forms

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If you already have a production site in , surely at some point you can start receiving spam, those messages with links that take you to pages of dubious origin and with text that has nothing to do with your site.

The spam It can be detrimental to SEO and the presence of your site, but don’t worry, one of the reasons for Spam is the lack of protection when it comes to (comments, registration, etc).

In this article we will see one of the best captcha plugin for WordPress that will help us to protect the main forms of our website in a simple way using Google Recaptcha.

What is Google Recaptcha?

The system Google captcha is an evolution of captcha.

And what is Captcha? Captcha is a type of security measures known as question-response authentication.

A captcha helps protect you from spam and password cracking by asking you to complete a simple test that proves you are human and not a computer or bot.

Google has two main versions of captcha.

recaptcha v2

It is a visual element that forces you to mark through a check that you are not a robot, however in some cases, despite passing this first validation, it could request additional validations showing images that you must select according to what is requested.

Recaptcha v3 (Invisible Captcha)

In this case, you no longer need to mark a check, instead Google Recaptcha analyzes the behavior of the user who is browsing the web to detect if he is a human or not, over time it generates a user profile and according to his history and assigns a score. This score will ultimately decide if you are a human or a bot.

Creating Recaptcha Keys

To use Recaptcha on your website you will need to register your site with Google Recaptcha.

With a Google account you can access the official site, at the top you will see a link to enter the Administration Console

Once inside the Administration Console, if you already have a website with Recaptcha, then you can add additional sites, using the “+” icon, as seen in the image.

If you do not have added sites then the following screen will appear directly:

From this screen you can select recaptcha version. In our case we will use version 2.

You will also have to add the domain which will use Recaptcha and accept the terms of service.

After making these changes and hitting submit, you will then get the keys, a site key and a private key.

You can copy and save these keys, you will use them in the next step.

Configure Google Recaptcha in WordPress

For Integrate Recaptcha with WordPress you can use a plugin, there are several to do this, however we will use the plugin .

From the WordPress administration, in Plugins > Add new, you can search for the Google Recaptcha text and locate the Recaptcha by BestWebSoft plugin.

After installing and activating the plugin you will see a new menu option as shown in the following image.

In the settings you can paste both the site key and the private key, also make sure you select the correct version of Recaptcha.

From this same screen you also have the option to disable recaptcha for certain user groups.

You can activate to display the Recaptcha validation in the different sections of your website.

The plugin also has a Premium version with additional options, for example integration with other plugins such as WooCommerce and Contact Forms 7.

After making the indicated settings, you will see that the recaptcha validation on the selected WordPress forms.

conclusion

Using Google Recaptcha validation in the main forms of your website will protect you against comment spam, as well as user registrations created by bots, and as you have seen, the configuration in WordPress is quite simple through a plugin.

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