Are you looking to add reCAPTCHA to your WordPress comment form?
Instead of turning off the comments, you can add CAPTCHA to the comment form to practically eliminate spam.
In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to easily add reCAPTCHA to the comment form of your WordPress website.
What is Google reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA it’s a free anti-spam service offered by Google. Easy to use, effective, easy to implement it’s the most used captcha API. You can read more at https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/. Let’s add Google reCAPTCHA to WordPress comments and see how it works.
Basically, it presents users with a simple check box that they can click to pass the test. If for some reason the test doesn’t validate, then the user will be presented with a challenge identifying text in an image or matching objects in multiple images.
How’s reCPATCHA test looks like to majority of your users:
Google reCAPTCHA easy to setup and add to the WordPress comment form.
Step 1: Get Started For Google reCAPTCHA
First thing you need to do is install and activate the reCAPTCHA in WP comments form plugin.
After activation, you need to visit Settings » reCAPTCHA in Comments page to configure plugin settings.
The plugin will ask you to provide Google reCAPTCHA API keys. You can create these keys for free from the official reCAPTCHA website.
Step 2: Register Your Website to Get reCAPTCHA API Keys
The plugin needs 2 Google API keys to add a reCAPTCHA checkbox to your comment form.
To get the API keys, head over to the Google reCAPTCHA website and click on the ‘Admin Console’ button located at the top right corner of the screen.
You will be asked to sign in with your Google account. After that, you’ll see the “Register a new site” page where you need to provide some basic information to register your site.
First, you need to type your website name or any name of your choice in the Label field. This will help you easily identify your site in the future.
This will open up 3 new options. Since you want to add the reCAPTCHA checkbox to your site, you need to select the “I’m not a robot checkbox” option.
The Domains textbox allows you to add the domain name of your website where you would like to add the reCAPTCHA checkbox.
You can also add multiple domains or subdomains by clicking on the plus (+) icon. This will allow you to use the same API keys on different websites.
Once you’ve filled the form, you can click on the Submit button to register your site.
Now show you a success message along with the site key and the secret key on this page.
Now you can use these API Keys in plugin settings on your website.
Step 3: Add reCAPTCHA to WordPress Comment Form
Head over to Settings » reCAPTCHA in Comments from the left sidebar of your admin panel,you need to scroll down to paste the site key and the secret key.
Once you’re done, click on the “Save your Google reCAPTCHA API Keys pair” button to store the API keys. and enable reCAPTCHA by clicking on the toggle button and then click on Save Changes.
The plugin also has Antispam Settings option which allows you to decide what to do when the plugin detects an unauthorized comment or security breach.
Congratulations, you’ve successfully added reCAPTCHA to your WordPress comment form.
Note:the reCAPTCHA checkbox will be displayed only to logged out users.
We hope this tutorial helped you learn how to add reCAPTCHA to the WordPress comment form of your website.