How To Fix Contact Form 7 v5.01 - Reverting Back To reCaptcha v2

As of the time of writing, v5.01 is broken. There are hundreds of 1-star reviews which have been piling up over the last few days.

It's not clear if the plugin itself is at fault or if the v3 of reCaptcha is just not filtering out the spam as effectively (maybe it's having to retrain its model for each new site, I'm not sure).

Either way, CF7 only supports v3 of the API at the moment.

I'm sure it will be fixed soon but in the meantime, you can solve it be using an extra plugin.

It's called Invisible reCaptcha for WordPress: https://wordpress.org/plugins/invisible-recaptcha/

Step By Step Guide

Go to Admin > Contact Form 7 >  Integrations and remove the API keys you have set up:

Then go to Plugins > Add Plugin and search for "Invisible reCaptcha for WordPress" by Mihai Chelaru.

Install it and activate it.

Open a new tab and go to your reCaptcha admin account: https://www.google.com/recaptcha/admin

Generate new keys with the setting reCAPTCHA v2 > Invisible

When you have filled out the form you will get some keys like you have used before:

Copy the Site Key into your clipboard.

Now go back to WordPress and go to Admin > Settings > Invisible reCaptcha

Paste the Site Key into the Site Key field, then go back and copy the Secret Key into the Secret Key.

Bonus: You can set the badge position - I prefer to make it the bottom left, or inline rather than its default right, that is often used up by a "back to top" element of the theme.

Click Save Changes.

IMPORTANT: There is one last step, it won't automatically work with Contact Form 7 forms.

Go to the Contact Forms tab, enabled it for Contact Form 7, and click Save Changes again on that tab:

OK your site is now safely protected again!

Hopefully, this will be fixed in the next few days.

PRO TIP: Don't forget to flush any cache plugins your site might be using.