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Are you getting a little tired of bots and fake submissions cluttering up your website’s inbox? Unfortunately, it’s a problem anyone with a WordPress website has faced. Webforms are fantastic for collecting information about the people who visit your pages. You can use that information to alert them to new posts, to new products, to send out newsletters…the possibility is endless. But sifting through all the forms, you receive to determine if a real person or a bot submitted them is tedious and time-consuming.
So, What Do You Do About It?
It’s a pretty simple process to stop spam form submissions while keeping your website easy for visitors to access. By adding reCAPTCHA to your WordPress website forms, you can eliminate the fake submissions. It's straightforward to add reCAPTCHA to your WordPress site thanks to a little plugin called WPForms. The program is very easy to use, and your followers won’t have to jump through hoops to confirm that they aren’t a bot. reCAPTCHA uses an algorithm to determine that in the background. reCAPTCHA is also a free service that Google provides to keep your website spam-free.
There are two types of reCAPTCHA available:
Checkbox reCAPTCHA allows your followers to click a checkbox to confirm that they are a human when they submit a form to your website.
There is also invisible reCAPTCHA that works in the background to verify the form submitter is a human. It doesn’t matter which version you use.
Both of these will protect your website.
The easiest way to add reCAPTCHA to your WordPress website is by using the WPForms plugin. It is one of the most beginner-friendly plugins in the platform's arsenal, and it allows you to add web forms without needing to write any computer code. It takes about five to ten minutes to set the form up correctly, but once the setup process is completed, everything becomes fully automated. You can be assured that the submissions you get after putting reCAPTCHA in place are coming from actual followers.
Before you start creating forms using WPForms, it is a good idea to have the forms you want on your website laid out, or have a list of fields that you want to use. The plugin will guide you through the process of creating and customizing the form so that it will appear the way you want it and function the way you need it to. You can create all types of forms with it, from donation forms to order forms, surveys and much more.
You can add as many or as little fields, as you want to appear on your form, using the drag and drop function in the form editor. Once it is the way you imagined it, simply click “Save” and your form will be just about ready to use. All that will be left is to configure the reCAPTCHA settings to checkbox or invisible and enable it on your new form. Add the form to your website and Google will start detecting whether a human or a bot is submitting the form.
If you are ready to stop guessing about the visitors to your website, it’s time to put reCAPTCHA to work for you. The WPForms plugin is waiting for you to download and install it on your WordPress website.
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Marysa Nicholson thank you for your comment! Yes, it definitely is important to set everything up correctly...if you still need to set everything up, please do come back and use my link in this post...;)
So useful to know, and it is important to have a contact form. I'll have to make sure I have this set up properly.
Tanya Young, thank you for your comment and I'm so happy to hear you are bookmarking it for tomorrow so that you can deal with it then. I appreciate you coming back to it! Be sure to use my link in the post...;)
This is perfect! I have been getting swamped with bots and it's s frustrating! Bookmarking because tomorrow I'll be dealing with this!