hCaptcha – How You Can Add It To Your WordPress Forms

If you are running a WordPress website, then you might be familiar with Captcha, right?

Captcha helps to protect our forms, comments, user registrations from spamming. Captcha also uses various ways.

The most common type of Captcha is Google ReCaptcha, which works quite well in most scenarios, though it isn’t perfect.

That is why hCaptcha comes, which is also a great alternative to Google ReCaptcha.

In this tutorial, I will be showing you what is hCaptcha and how you can use it in your WordPress forms.

What is hCaptcha?

hCaptcha is a free spam protection service or tool that asks simple questions to the users and uses machine learning and AI to detect the difference between humans and bots to protect your form from spam.

And the thing which makes the difference between hCaptcha and Google ReCaptcha is hCaptcha is compatible with recent regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.

It is enough about hCaptcha, let’s see how you can add hCaptcha in your WordPress forms.

How to add hCaptcha in your WordPress forms

90 percent chance you are using WPForms in your WordPress website for creating your forms, right? If so, please shout out to the comment section.

Here we are going to use WPForms to create our forms and add hCaptcha to the form.

WPForms is the most popular and advanced form building plugin for WordPress. It is also a drag and drop form builder plugin, so it is a great choice for non-techies.

And adding hCaptcha on your WPForms is more simple than you think.

If you want to create simple contact forms, newsletter forms then you don’t need to buy their paid plan, you can use their free plan. But for getting advanced features, you will need to buy their paid plan.

Advanced features mean you are able to use conditional logic in your forms, create multi-step forms, survey forms, order forms, add payment systems in your forms, etc.

First, we are going to install and activate WPForms on our website. So let’s see how you can do that.

Step – 1. Install and active WPForms

To install WPForms, simply login to your WordPress website and go to Plugins > Add New, search for “WPForms” and install and then activate the plugin.

If you are a premium user of WPForms, copy your license key from WPForms’ website and paste it under the WPForms > Settings section.

Once you have done it, you have successfully installed and activated WPForms.

So, let’s move forward to the next step where we will configure WPForms for hCaptcha.

Step – 2. Configure WPForms for hCaptcha

Go to WPForms > Settings and switch to the CAPTCHA tab. Here choose the hCaptcha option to configure it.

Once you have selected the hCaptcha tab, it will open a form and you need to fill all the details.

The first thing which you need to fill in is your Site Key and Secret Key for hCaptcha.

To get your site and secret key, go to hCaptcha and create your hCaptcha account.

Next, log in to your account and click the New Site button in the upper right corner to get started.

It will open a form where you need to fill some details.

If you’d like, you can add a name to this specific site key under the Add New Sitekey section by clicking the pencil icon. This is for your reference only, and will not be seen by your users on the front end.

Enter the name of your website on the Hostnames section where you will be adding hCaptcha on.

Captcha difficulty allows you to choose the difficulty level of the hCaptcha within your forms. A lower difficulty level means your users will be presented with an image challenge less often than if you had set a higher difficulty level.

And the last option is Filter captchas by audience interests, where you can choose up to 3 different interests that will filter what type of content will be shown in your captchas.

Once you’ve configured your settings, be sure to click the Save button to save your settings.

After saving it, you will be redirected to your site key’s settings page, where you will get your keys.

Here click the Settings button to view your site key.

Copy your site key from under the site key section and paste it on your WPForms-hCaptcha configuration page.

Then, you’ll need to copy your Secret Key from hCaptcha into your WPForms settings as well. Go ahead and close out of your site key settings to return to your site key overview. And then click the Settings tab.

Now copy your secret key and paste it in your WPForms settings, and be sure to click the Save Settings button to save your settings.

Now that you’ve added your keys, you can also optionally adjust other hCaptcha settings.

If someone fails to complete the hCaptcha, the Fail Message will be shown to them. You can use the default message or type a new one.

Sometimes CAPTCHA is loaded more than once on your site (for example, by both WPForms and your WordPress theme), this can prevent hCaptcha from working properly. If you enable No-Conflict Mode, it removes any CAPTCHA code that’s not loaded by WPForms.

Don’t enable this. However, we highly recommend getting in touch with the WPForms support team if you’re at all unsure whether to use this option

If you successfully configured your hCaptcha setting in WPforms, it will show you a Preview. If things are configured incorrectly, this setting will show an error message.

So, now we have done it, right? Yes, now it is time to add hCaptcha in our form.

Step – 3. Add hCaptcha to a form

It is the last and easiest step to follow for adding hCaptcha to a form.

If you have already created your form using WPForms, just edit your form. And if you are new to WPForms, first create your form.

After you’ve opened the form builder, look under the Standard Fields section and click on the hCaptcha field.

Drag that field from left to right to add it. Once you have successfully added it, you can see a batch in the upper right corner of your form builder.

Done, right? Yes. Now you have successfully added hCaptcha in your WordPress forms using WPForms.

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