How To Easily Add hCaptcha With WPForms (& Why)

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According to Kinsta, WordPress powers 60.8% of the CMS market share in the world. More than 14.7% of the world’s websites run on WordPress. 


Now, that’s indeed saying something about the popularity of WordPress. 


The story no one told you is that this also makes WordPress vulnerable. Your website, based on WordPress, is completely vulnerable to hacking, malware, attempts to break-in, spam comments, spam form fill ups, and so much more. 


If you aren’t careful enough, your website can break. 

One of the more pressing problems — among several others — is form spam. Bots and malicious visitors trying to attack the forms on your WordPress site to exploit the data within. That data could be your email list, your customers’ credit card or payment details stored on your website, and really anything else. 


Learning how to stop Contact Form Spam is now more important than ever. 

Read: 

Plugin vulnerabilities represent 56% of the known entry points for cyber attacks. With over 55,000 WordPress plugins that collectively have been downloaded over one billion times and more added monthly, it’s more important than ever to update them safely

Security plugins are a crucial part of your website or your clients’ website protection. Here are the best WordPress security plugins for your needs, we’ve collected 8 great options that can help with security hardening, firewalls, and malware scanning.

The first step to Stop Form Spam: Use Captcha

Previously, WPForms introduced direct integration of the form builder directly into Elementor Builder to make it easier for you to add and create forms of any kind while you build out your Elementor site. 

Learn more about How to Add WPForms to an Elementor Page.

WPForms also introduced anti-spam protection replacing the old HoneyPot spam feature. 

There was, however, a need to add more layers of protection to prevent spam on WordPress while giving you more options to choose from as far as spam control for WordPress is concerned. For that reason, WPforms rolled out the brand new hCaptcha

What is hCaptcha?

hCaptcha now runs on 15% of the Internet, according to YCombinator. 

hcaptcha

hCaptcha is a direct and simple drop-in replacement for reCaptcha. Using easy tasks for humans but hard for bots, hCaptcha tries to solve not just the spam form problem but also issues with regards to privacy, data usage, and data exploitation. 

hCaptcha protects user privacy, rewards websites, and helps companies get their data labeled. 

Read: 

Unmasked: What 10 million passwords reveal about the people who choose them WordPress #securityfirst

There are three simple reasons why hCaptcha should be your preferred choice (remember, every business that has a blog is also a publisher). 

  • Focus on Privacy: Ad networks see your visitors as the product. hCaptcha doesn’t care who your users are, only how likely they are to be malicious. hCaptcha also supports initiatives like Privacy Pass, and works hard to balance privacy and security.
  • Security first: Accuracy is in your interest and theirs. hCaptcha is publisher-focused. hCaptcha works to give you real data and let you decide how to use it. Other captchas provided by other companies (Read: Google) have a vested interest: each bot or visitor they block may reduce their revenue.
  • Better user experience: Sophisticated machine learning models are used to determine humanity. This requires less annoying tasks from users and takes less of your time in doing so, while still producing useful labeled data.

Mathew Prince recently announced that Cloudflare moved from Google’s reCaptcha to hCaptcha for much of the same reasons as above. Further, Cloudflare made that decision also because hCaptcha was effective, could scale, and was offered for free. 

How To Set Up hCaptcha with WPForms: Free And Privacy-focused

Getting started with hCaptcha with WPForms is easy. Just get to your WPForms Plugin settings, click on CAPTCHA, choose hCaptcha. 

Note: As you can see from the image below, you still retain the choice to use Google’s reCaptcha

WPForms hCaptcha settings

Working with WPForms & hCaptcha


If and when you build your forms for WordPress, you want to keep these forms as bulletproof as possible. That means it’s on you to keep out the bots, malicious visitors, malware, spam comments, break-ins, bad user signups, and more. 

Instead of creating forms and then worrying, just use the available CAPTCHA options that you’ve enabled with WPForms (above) such as hCaptcha or reCaptcha. 

WPForms also includes the ability to add hCaptcha element to any form you build, right through the WPForms builder as shown in the screenshot below: 

Read: 

How to Accept Payments On WordPress [With WPForms]  

WPForms Stripe Integration: How Collect Recurring Payments Easily

10 WordPress Security Issues And How to Fix Them

WPForms Builder with hCaptcha

Learn more about hCaptcha and see how WPForms can help you create forms of all kinds such as Payment forms (Integrated with Stripe or PayPal), file upload forms, contact forms, and more. 

Check out various other features of popular WPForms for WordPress and WPForms add-ons such as smart conditional logic, instant notifications, multi-page forms, and so much more. 

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