Easily add hCaptcha with WPForms

How do you combat web spam if you have contact forms on your WordPress blog or website? Well for years some have just had to contend with the spam coming into their inbox. Some have used simple math challenges at the end of their forms.

But the most popular method has been to use Google reCAPTCHA – or other services giving similar promises to webmasters. But what if you wanted an alternative that is just as robust and free? You’d be right to consider using the popular alternative hCaptcha.

What is hCaptcha

It is a free and privacy-focused alternative to the popular Google reCAPTCHA service.

It promises to help you stop more bots while paying you, via Paypal, for the hCaptcha challenges users solve on your site.

The CAPTCHA challenges used by hCaptcha are collected from difficult-to-label data from machine learning problems. They are easy for humans to solve but difficult for bots.

Like Google reCAPTCHA, you can start using hCaptcha on your site for free.

To sign up for a hCaptcha account click here.

More details on how to get the various keys you need to enable the hCaptcha functionality on WPForms below.

How does hCaptcha work

It will add another element to your WPForms contact forms. So, besides having the default name, email address and message fields, WPForms will show a hCaptcha box prompting your site’s visitors to complete a challenge before they can click on the Submit button to send their message.

When the box is checked it will trigger a CAPTCHA challenge which has to be completed successfully before the data entered in the various fields in the form can be submitted.

How to set up hCaptcha (Adding hCaptcha to WPForms plugin)

Before you can start using hCaptcha on contact forms you build using WPForms, you will need a hCaptcha sitekey and secret key.

To get the keys, sign up for an account on hCaptcha.com.

Then, just like Google reCAPTCHA, enter your site’s URL – and create a new site key under the Sites tab.

For the secret key, navigate to the Settings tab. You will get it there.

Next go inside WPForms and copy and paste the two keys into the relevant fields and Save the changes. How?

• Go to your WordPress admin dashboard.
• Click on WPForms > Settings
• Click on the CAPTCHA tab and click on the hCaptcha service to paste the two keys from your hCaptcha account dashboard.

To add hCaptcha into a form you have already created, simply select that WPForms contact form to edit it. Under the Fields tab, click on the button that says hCaptcha to add the service to your form. Save the changes you make.

The hCaptcha integration is available in all WPForms plans – that is if you run version 1.6.4 of WPForms upwards.

To check the current pricing for the various licenses, check the WPForms pricing page here.

Conclusion

There is more web traffic / more people using the internet than ever before. That means that there is also more spam being sent on the web. And for sites that don’t have robust systems in place to deal with this issue, their owners are at the mercy of spammers fine sending as much unsolicited messages as they can.

But now, using the power and simplicity of both WPForms and hCaptcha, you can secure your contact forms in minutes.

Use the two to make it hard for bots to reach your inbox without disrupting communication between you and other humans – genuinely interested in interacting with you.

Can I use hCaptcha with WPForms plugin?

Yes. If you are already using Google reCAPTCHA on your WPForms contact forms and want to test how hCaptcha works, you can follow the instructions in this post (scroll up) to get the necessary keys from hCaptcha.com and add them to your WPForms settings page.

Can I use both hCaptcha and Google reCAPTCHA in contact forms I create on my site with WPForms?

Using both on the same form would be overkill to me. However, if you have multiple contact forms on your website, you can use hCaptcha on some forms and Google reCAPTCHA on others. This is a good way to test things out – to see which spam-prevention service you like best between the two.

Is it necessary to enable / add a captcha service to contact forms I build with WPForms WordPress plugin?

It depends. For a low traffic blog – with a few hits to the contact forms daily / weekly, you can just run your site without worrying about adding a captcha service to your forms.

However, it becomes necessary to add a captcha service to your forms when you start seeing more emails that are spammy in nature coming through to your email inbox from your site’s contact forms.

If you have any questions on how to add hCaptcha with WPForms, leave a comment below.