Setup Google ReCAPTCHA with Breakdance Builder

Google's ReCAPTCHA is a free service that can be used to protect your website from spam and abuse. In this article, we'll show you how to set up reCAPTCHA with contact forms on your Breakdance Builder WordPress website.

Justin Gluska

Updated January 13, 2023

recaptcha in breakdance builder

recaptcha in breakdance builder

Reading Time: 4 minutes

When creating a website, you may want to add a CAPTCHA to your forms to prevent spam submissions. When your site starts to rank, it can get really annoying when you get tons of unsolicited offers what seems like every hour. You could integrate reCaptcha to work with the Breakdance Builder plugin to solve this. Google's reCaptcha is a free service that can be used to protect your website from spam, abuse, and other website annoyances. In this article, we'll show you how to set up reCaptcha with your contact forms if you're building your WordPress website with Breakdance Builder.

What is Google reCAPTCHA?

Google's reCAPTCHA is a free service that provides a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) for your website. A CAPTCHA is a puzzle challenge & response test used to prove that form users are human opposed to a pesky spam bot. We'll be setting this up with reCaptcha v3, which is the newest version of the tool.

Google reCAPTCHA Pricing

The service is free to use. All you have to do is set up an account with Google, get a site, and secret key to enable it on your forms.

How to Generate Google reCAPTCHA Keys

Create a new account on the signup page and enter your website's URL. After this, you'll have to register your site and link it with your account. Enter the site URL, select the version of reCaptcha (we recommend using v3 – it's newer, less intrusive, and integrates more seamlessly.

google recaptcha setup for individual website

Once you've registered your website, you'll be given a Site Key and a Secret Key. These keys are used to authenticate your website with Google reCAPTCHA. Keep both keys safe & make sure to treat your private key like a typical website password. Nobody should have access to these besides site administrators!

site and secret key for google recaptcha

Setup Google reCAPTCHA With Breakdance

Once you've generated the keys for your site, you'll need to add them to your Breakdance Builder settings. You can set this up in a few seconds in the plugin settings of Breakdance. Navigate to the API tab in the Breakdance Settings plugin page and enter both your site and secret keys.

entering site key and secret key for google recaptcha in breakdance builder on a wordpress website

Test Breakdance + reCAPTCHA Implementation

View reCaptcha activity for your site & troubleshoot any issues with implementation in the analytics tab on the reCaptcha dashboard. Ensure your website is live and you've configured all your domain settings properly. On the analytics page, you can see detailed statistics like how many requests were made, how many were valid, and how many weren't.

You can test your implementation by submitting a form on your website. If everything is working properly, you should see a success message & see the traffic get tagged on the dashboard. If things aren't, you'll see the suspicious request percentage rise (or be 100% if it's the only request)

analytics dashboard of google recaptcha showing user requests

Configuring reCAPTCHA Settings in Breakdance

You can also configure the settings on an individual form builder as opposed to your entire site in the settings API option. Open the specific form you want to add verification to and go to the "Advanced" tab. Here, you'll see an option to enable reCAPTCHA. Select the checkbox and then choose the custom key settings. Just like before, enter both your site and the secret key here.

Honeypot Field

A honeypot field is an additional layer of protection against spam submissions. It's a hidden field that's added to the form that bots will [hopefully] fall for & fill out. Humans won't see this but sometime users might run into spam blocks preventing them from submitting forms. In our experience, it's still worth keeping honeypot on.

To add a honeypot field to your form, go to the "Advanced" tab and turn on the option. You don't have to configure anything else.

honeypot field in breakdance builder

Hide reCAPTCHA Icon in Breakdance

Some users report a small watermark icon reCaptcha displays at the bottom right of the screen. To fix this, you can add some custom code to remove the badge from being visible on the frontend (and yes, it's allowed).

Another Good Anti-Spam Plugin for Breakdance

In conjunction with reCaptcha, we'd recommend checking out Akismet. This is the only plugin we've ever had to use with our Breakdance websites and rarely get bot spam. Of course you'll still get the occasional people trying to sell you horrific SEO or outsourced website development, but you won't get bots that send 1000+ forms a day.

Conclusion

reCaptcha is a great tool – and it's free. If you run into (or are worried about) spam submissions across your website contact forms, you should register and enable it. Breakdance makes it fairly easy to integrate once you generate your keys & link a domain. Hopefully this helped you set up some anti-spam measures. Happy designing!

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Written by Justin Gluska

Justin is the founder of Gold Penguin, a business technology blog that helps people start, grow, and scale their business using AI. The world is changing and he believes it's best to make use of the new technology that is starting to change the world. If it can help you make more money or save you time, he'll write about it!

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