How to set up Google reCAPTCHA in WordPress

How to set up Google reCAPTCHA on your site?

We need to follow these steps to set Google reCaptcha on your site:

1. Setup your Google reCAPTCHA account
2. Installing the WordPress reCAPTCHA plugin
3. Attach the reCaptcha plugin to the reCaptcha account
4. Where to show Captcha?

Setup your Google reCAPTCHA account

Firstly, we need to create an account on Google reCAPTCHA. This can be done manually or by signing up with Google. After signing up, click on the admin panel of Google reCAPTCHA and attach your website to it.

Here we fill in different fields and attach the site to the Google captcha.

1. Label
2. Recaptcha type
3. Domain

Label: A label is a tag name that helps to identify and define an object.
Domain: Domain name of your website like example.com
reCAPTCHA-type: There are two versions of reCAPTCHA :

1. reCAPTCHA – v3 (verify with a score)
2. reCAPTCHA – v2 (verify with a challenge)

After submitting the form, we can view the keys used by the plugin to connect the site with reCAPTCHA. There are two types of keys:

• Public key – Anyone can see this key.
• Private key – It is a confidential key that needs to be secured from unauthorized access.

Go to the “GO TO ANALYTICS” button and click it to view the traffic on your site. After that, you can analyze the traffic and determine whether “WHO IS ?” Human or Bot.

Can you clarify what the Google reCAPTCHA is?

reCAPTCHA is the service provided by Google that helps distinguish between humans and bots. The term CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. reCAPTCHA helps protect websites from malicious data and spam. It often provides puzzle games for humans to solve, and tests to determine whether the solver is human or bot. These tests are easy for humans to solve, but not for bots.

ReCAPTCHA was developed by a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s main Pittsburgh campus, including Luis von Ahn, David Abraham, Manuel Blum, Michael Crawford, Ben Maurer, Colin McMillen, and Edison Tan.

Can you explain what the Bot is?

Bot is a software application that runs automatically. Some bots can be harmful because they can leak sensitive information (like passwords, user information, company information, etc). However, some bots can be beneficial. For example, Google has a bot that indexes websites and pages, which is not harmful.
Sometimes bots are referred to as “Robot” or “Spider” because they automatically discover the website by following the links. The main crawler of Google used for Google Search is also called “Googlebot“. There are two types of Googlebot web crawlers :

1. Googlebot Desktop
2. Googlebot Smartphone

Installing the WordPress reCAPTCHA plugin

To get started, you will need to install the plugin and then activate the Advanced Google reCAPTCHA plugin. You can see the guidelines on how to the install WordPress Plugin.

Once the installation process is complete, you will be able to locate and utilize the Advanced Google reCAPTCHA plugin.

Attach the reCaptcha plugin to the reCaptcha account

Go to the Advanced Google reCAPTCHA menu by clicking on the setting located underneath it. You can view different options related to this plugin.

Attention all users! Captcha is now disabled. To ensure a smooth and hassle-free experience has been defined the different types of captcha and their features below. Below the captcha input box, you can see the different types of captchas to choose from.

Here we will be using reCaptcha version 3 and adding the keys obtained from the Google Captcha account for activation. Add the site key and secret key to the Captcha Site Key and Captcha Secret Key fields respectively and click the verify Captcha button to verify the keys. A popup will appear on the tab and show the result of verification.

When a user enters the correct Captcha matches, a message “Captcha has been verified successfully” will pop up, otherwise verification will fail.

After completing the verification, click on the save changes button.

Where to show Captcha?

Click on Where To Show you can see the options related to showing the captcha on your site now and You can select where to display the captcha on your website. Here we selected some options and the captcha would be shown on our site.
Now we can see Captcha on the Comment section and Login page of our site.