reCAPTCHA (v2)

On Contact Form 7 4.3 and greater, reCAPTCHA is the standard CAPTCHA solution.

Don’t confuse reCAPTCHA with Really Simple CAPTCHA, which was the default CAPTCHA solution prior to 4.3. Really Simple CAPTCHA is a WordPress plugin I’ve created and maintained for 8 years. reCAPTCHA is Google’s service, and has tremendous advantages over Really Simple CAPTCHA.

To get started with reCAPTCHA, you need a Google account and to register your site for an API key pair.

Screen shot of Google reCAPTCHA admin page
Screen shot of Google reCAPTCHA admin page
  1. Go to Google’s reCAPTCHA admin page.
  2. Register your site.
  3. Get a site key and secret key.

Choose the “reCAPTCHA v2” + “Checkbox” type.

Copy the key pair into the WordPress admin screen of the site you registered.

  1. Go to the admin menu Contact > Integration.
  2. Find reCAPTCHA panel and click Configure Keys.
  3. Copy the site key and secret key into the fields and save them.

Lastly, put a placeholder for a reCAPTCHA widget ([recaptcha]) into your contact form content.

A [recaptcha] placeholder is a form-tag, and like other form-tags, it supports several options.

Available options for recaptcha
Option Examples Description
theme:(theme) theme:dark The color theme of the widget. Available values are dark and light. The default value is light.
size:(size) size:compact The size of the widget. Available values are compact and normal. The default value is normal.
id:(id) id:foo id attribute value of the widget.
class:(class) class:bar class attribute value of the widget. To set two or more classes, you can use multiple class: option, like [recaptcha class:y2008 class:m01 class:d01].

Example:

[recaptcha size:compact]

Just another contact form plugin for WordPress. Simple but flexible.