How To Set Up hCaptcha – A FREE & Privacy-focused Alternative

It is really… really… really… important to keep your website forms free from spambots and automated submissions, not only because of the invalid entries but also it will highly utilize your system resources.

Google reCAPTCHA is one of the widely used bot prevention tools, and hCAPTCHA (h stands for human) is a great alternative for the reCAPTCHA if you get site conflicts or concerned about privacy. hCAPTCHA is compactable with recent privacy regulations such as GDPR, CCPA etc.

The cost? It’s completely free.

How to setup hCAPTCHA in WordPress?

In this tutorial, we’ll be using WPForms form builder, which is one of the best form builder plugin available for WordPress websites to create and manage forms (even payment forms by integrating Stripe/ Paypal).

Let’s start by creating a form first!

Step 1: Create a Contact Form

Once you’ve installed and activated the WPForms plugin, it is pretty easy to create your first form.

In WordPress dashboard, click on the ‘Add New Form’ link under WPForms.

You can determine whether you need a simple contact form or a multi-step form based on your discretion.

Here’s detailed instructions on how to make your WordPress form multi-step.

Awesome! Now, let’s integrate the hCAPTCHA on your new form!

Step 2. Integrate hCAPTCA on WordPress Form

In WPForms settings, you can see the option to choose either hCAPTCHA or Google reCAPTCHA.

Using hCAPTCHA you can protect your forms from bots and spammers without compromising your privacy.

Once you click on the hCAPTCHA, you can easily configure settings like Fail Message, No-confict Mode etc to make your form more professional.

Inside the form editor, you can simply drag and drop the hCAPTCHA element on your form to get the captcha activated.

Your forms are now protected with hCAPTCHA. 🙂

If you have any questions, feel free to shoot it as a comment below.