How to turn off reCAPTCHA protection on Shopify

Shopify reCaptcha is a free tool that helps protect your Shopify store from spam and abuse. It uses risk analysis techniques to distinguish between humans and bots. And appears on contact, login, and registration pages when a form is submitted.

While reCAPTCHA protection can help to improve the security of your website, it can also be difficult for some users to solve them. And can often be detrimental to the user experience and the registration and login processes in Shopify.

It is important to weigh the benefits and drawbacks before deciding whether or not turning off reCaptcha protection in Shopify. But if after thinking about it you decided to go ahead without this tool, in the following article you can find some quick steps to disable this feature.

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How to turn off reCaptcha protection in Shopify

Google Captcha protection can be turned off in the Shopify settings if you wish to ease the processes of login and registration in Shopify. Or if you have been receiving complaints from your customers on the submissions of forms. Reducing Captcha disruptions also helps in enhancing your Shopify SEO efforts by offering a smoother, more user-friendly experience for visitors.

To disable it:

• Browse to your Shopify Admin > Online Shop > Preferences, and scroll all the way down to Spam protection
  

• Disable the second of the protections on login and registration (create account) pages. If you wish you can disable the protection on contact and comment forms as well. Then click on Save and it's done.

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Better alternatives to Google Captcha protection when signing-up new customers?

If you find the reCaptcha challenges to be bad for your business, but want to maintain control over the accounts created on your site. A good alternative is to add one more verification step during account creation, before customers can create an account.

This extra step is not available in Shopify as a native feature but can be provided by our app as part of the Custom Forms plugin:

• In the Basic Plan you can use Email Verification. Submission of registration form creates an inactive customer account that needs to be verified by email
• In the Advanced Plan you can use Account Approval. Each submission will result in an application that you as an admin will need to approve or reject before the account can be created
  

Get to know more about this valuable plugin. Build custom registration and profile forms to collect any information you need from your customers: ☑️ Custom Forms

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Other frequently asked questions

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Why are my customers seeing a reCAPTCHA challenge when logging in or signing up?

Shopify Google Captcha is a free tool that helps protect your Shopify store from spam and abuse. It uses risk analysis techniques to distinguish between humans and bots. And appears on contact, login, and registration pages when a form is submitted.

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How does Shopify Captcha work?

Google Captcha uses advanced techniques to analyze visitors' behavior and identify bots. For example, it will scan and score the number of requests made from the IP address in a given period of time, and its location.

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Is Google reCaptcha good for my site?

Google challenges are usually very effective at preventing spam and abuse. This protection is also easy to implement and use, and free. But some users can find Google Captcha to be repetitive and even difficult to solve (e.g. users with visual impairments). Being this way detrimental to customer experience. Ultimately, the decision of whether should depend on the feedback you received from your customers.

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How do customers pass the challenges?

The most common way to pass a Google Captcha challenge is to solve a puzzle. This usually involves identifying objects in an image or selecting the correct text from a list of options.

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Why customers are requested to pass many challenges in a row?

Google analyzes and scores the risk of the visitor attending to different factors. If Google considers the visitor a risk they may request the customer to present more than one challenge to the visitor.

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How can I disable reCaptcha protection in contact forms?

It's in the same Shopify setting we described above (Online Store > Preferences > Spam Protection). You'd need to tick off the first of checkboxes labelled "Enable Google reCaptcha on contact and comments forms"

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I can't pass the image challenges in Google reCaptcha

We usually find that in Shopify the image challenges of Google reCaptcha get stuck, repeat, and make you lose tons of time. There's usually the alternative of choosing an Audio challenge that usually works better. So you can try clicking and passing this type of challenge.

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