I normally use CF7 for forms, but I’ve been using WP Forms on a few sites where they might need to be styled and maintained by clients. However, I was finding that I was getting huge amounts of spam on WP Forms, even with inbuilt reCaptcha and anti-spam protection turned on, especially if the page URL contains “contact”. The same level of protection on CF7 (honeypot and reCaptcha) was not presenting an issue. It took me a while, but to save you time, let’s get straight to the point: here’s my WP Forms Spam Fix.
Go into reCaptcha settings for the domain and change “Security Preference” from the medium default to “Most secure”. Suddenly no more spam and normal users aren’t affected.
Some things I tried that didn’t help at all:
Thoughts and Prayers.
Wringing of hands.
Zero Spam plugin – this supposedly had an integration with WP Forms. It didn’t help.
Adding words to the WordPress comment blacklist – this helps for CF7, but doesn’t seem to used by WP Forms at all.
If this helped you, please comment below.
