How to Secure Your WordPress Site With reCAPTCHA

How to Secure Your WordPress Site With reCAPTCHA

WordPress at present is amongst the largest content management systems online and hence security and privacy are the two major parameters to secure. The topmost priority for any developer is to develop a website which is safe and avoids unwanted visitors.

It helps in running the website smoothly. reCAPTCHA is the leading and most efficient solution to secure your WordPress site.

Spam bots and Spam have affected many websites. The entire process of attaching themselves to a specific website is annoying and disgraceful. It is a threat to the website and its visitors.

reCAPTCHA works like an antidote against spambots and spam. It constantly works to keep these threats away and protect your website.

To add an additional cover of security for your WordPress site reCAPTCHA is a resourceful and trouble-free method. It is similar to a CAPTCHA and mandatorily confirms that no bot or system has access to your website or its data.

Exploring the Mechanism of reCAPTCHA

A challenge-response simulation is used to secure your WordPress site by reCAPTCHA.  The simulation has various patterns and formations.

It occurs in a line of nebulous displayed numbers of words, identifying pictures in a set, and in other forms that include pictures with numbers.

Such tasks cannot be completed by bots and hence assures that user seeking access to a specific operation or a site is actually a human.

For humans, it is not a difficult task. It includes basic understanding and interpretation skills. BY fulfilling the simple challenge and entering the correct combination in the form of words and numbers, an actual user can easily gain access to the secured region.

A key point to be remembered while analyzing the pros and cons of reCAPTCHA is that it is most efficient in filtering the spammers away but the actual existence of this method is for preventing spammers from consuming access and from clogging your WordPress site.

Calculating and analyzing in terms of statistics there will be spammers who can penetrate this method and hence developers opt for multiple layers of security.

Setting reCAPTCHA for your WordPress Website

To set-up reCAPTCHA on your WordPress site all you have to do is follow simple steps. It is not a complicated process at all. You must be well aware about the primary fact that it is through Google Captcha only that one can add reCAPTCHA.

Hence due to this the information and steps on adding it can vary slightly depending upon the device of use. Following is the information based on our experience in the process of implementing a few of our plugins.

a) Basic Procedure

In the plugin, one must head to the setting screen. Depending upon the plugin the reCAPTCHA field will be located in different sections. Google provides the API keys on the reCAPTCHA page which are required to use this feature.

Because of various factors, there is a periodically change in the process of retrieving the keys. Despite the change, it always involves adding basic information about your website after logging in and creating a project.

After doing so one must follow appropriate steps in the process and add keys in the respective boxes which are received from Google. Alignment can be modified and changed by the user from the setting option, as required in the WordPress site.

After all, the process is completed and necessary modification is done you must save the new changes. Immediately after this reCAPTCHA will be activated on your WordPress site.

b) Email Domain Blacklist Plugin

Email registration is required by many websites in addition to reCAPTCHA to access online content. As an added security cover many websites prefer to add reCAPTCHA for and after email registration to enhance protection. The plugin ensures no spammers get through the email registration by creating a blacklist and white list.

The plugin comes with dominant features which are accessible only through the premium version to help secure your WordPress site. Some of them are:

  • Online domain filtering
  • Prevention of blacklisted email registration
  • Adding domains to separate white and black list.

It is priced at $59 & $29 for five websites and two websites respectively.

Conclusion

It can be concluded without any uncertainty that reCAPTCHA is an impactful and inevitable method to secure your WordPress site. It has the potential to ensure that, even after repeated attempts, a spammer cannot access your website.  

reCAPTCHA efficiently manages to avoid spam emails which save you a lot of time and only important emails are stored in your inbox. It also provides you with the advantage of staying away from spammed emails which redirects you to fake sites that can do a lot of harm and information theft from your device.

It can also block spam comments on your WordPress site. It is essential to ensure a hassle-free experience to your visitors, which will result in a boost in traffic on your website, and reCAPTCHA is an influential step towards achieving it.

Deepika Sharma

Writer and WordPress blogger at SKT Themes. Handling content partnerships, doing outreach, and making sure sktthemes.in is up to date.