If you have a website that has a contact form, there’s a strong chance you’ve had to deal with tons of spam emails with bots filling out these forms.
Some of them are just pure garbage, some are offering SEO services with an automated pitch, and others might seem legit at first. But almost all of these messages are sent by bots these days.
I was getting an overwhelming number of these form fills on my WordPress site using Kadence forms. It was getting to a point where I was missing real messages from students and customers.
I couldn’t mark these as spam, because that would also cause my real inquiries to go to spam.
I’ve tested several solutions, and finally found something that seems to be working. This is still somewhat experimental for me, so if you have your own experience, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Keep in mind that this solution is specifically for WordPress and Kadence, using Kadence Forms.
Other popular contact forms will have similar options and functionality, just do a Google search for your form name and reCAPTCHA or Turnstile and see what comes up!
Use the built in Google reCAPTCHA settings
Kadence has Google reCAPTCHA functionality built into their basic contact form (and the Advanced Form block).
For right now, I’m testing this on the Fuel Your Photos contact form. I implemented it a few weeks ago, and since then I haven’t received a single spam entry.
I ended up using the V2 option because when I was testing V3 it was causing issues where the form wouldn’t submit at all.
I’m sure I could have done some troubleshooting to figure out V3, and there are other tutorials out there, but the V2 worked immediately for me and seems to be doing the job for now!
If you follow the link to “Get keys” from the form, you can follow the prompts to add your domain and get your site and secret keys.
You can also add reCAPTCHA from your Google Cloud console if you have a project started there.
I’ll link to the full tutorial by Kadence below. If you’re still having issues setting this up, leave me a comment on this post. If there is enough interest I can do a YouTube video walkthrough!
Extra note: I chose the medium security setting, and left both of these boxes checked.
I hate that people will need to solve a Captcha to submit a simple contact form, but it has already allowed me to reply to people quickly and only get messages that I actually want to see. In my book, that is worth it.
Other things I tested
Kadence CAPTCHA
If you have the Kadence full bundle, they have an additional plugin designed specifically for adding reCAPTCHA or Cloudflare Turnstile across your entire site.
This can be used on comments, logins, and more. I wanted to mention this because if you are already using Kadence and have bought into their entire ecosystem, this might be the most robust solution for preventing spam across your site.
However, this plugin does not protect Kadence Forms, so it wasn’t the solution that I needed.
https://www.kadencewp.com/help-center/docs/kadence-general/kadence-captcha/
Simple CAPTCHA Alternative
I’ve seen many recommendations for this plugin in various WordPress groups, so I decided I would test it on my personal blog so I can compare it to the solutions above.
You can add the plugin by going to “Plugins” in WordPress, going to “Add New” and searching for “Simple CAPTCHA Alternative” then installing and activating directly in your dashboard.
They have a full setup tutorial, which I followed to set it up on my site.
https://elliotsowersby.com/blog/setup-guide-turnstile/
However, the tutorial was a bit out of date. I had to search to find the Turnstile settings, and add a widget instead of a site.
The plugin theoretically has an integration with Kadence forms.
I checked this box, and made sure everything was configured correctly.
However, this did not add the turnstile to any of my Kadence forms.
I tested on multiple Kadence sites (they are all hosted on Cloudways). I did plenty of diagnostics, turned off caching, tried different options, but none of them seemed to work.
Not only that, but it broke the Kadence forms all together.
Like I said, this plugin has great reviews and over 100k installs, with many people reporting success.
I thought about leaving it out of this blog post since it didn’t work for me, but wanted to include it in case the developer makes updates for Kadence users in the future, or if any of my readers need an alternative for non-Kadence forms!
If you have other suggestions, please leave a comment below so I can review them and keep this post updated!
Great information, I have so much spam. Question though, what do I put for label? And will this work for any wordpress site?