How to hide reCAPTCHA icon in WordPress

Google reCAPTCHA is familiar for WordPress users, especially for those who use Contact Form 7. Google reCAPTCHA protects your contact form from spam messages. Sadly, Contact Form 7 doesn’t support reCAPTCHA v2 from two years ago. This means the only option is the v3 which comes with a huge caveat and that’s showing the reCAPTCHA logo on the bottom right corner of every page of your site. This is quite off-putting and cause overlapping with most of the cookie consent message boxes. In this article, I go through how to hide the reCAPTCHA icon in any WordPress site.

Note on Google reCAPTCHA terms of use

Google legally allows anyone that uses reCAPTCHA to hide the icon. Though, it mandates consumers to add the following block of code to any place that’s protected by reCAPTCHA.

That means if you use reCAPTCHA only for Contact Form 7, adding the above code in the contact form page should suffice.

So we are not doing anything illegally here but just be mindful and add the code any other applicable place. You can find more on the matter here.

Hiding the reCAPTCHA using CSS

The easiest and most recommended approach, even by Google, is to use CSS for hiding the reCAPTCHA. In WordPress you can do that by going to Admin dashboard -> Appearance -> Edit CSS -> Additional CSS. Once you open the CSS editor, add the following code at the bottom of the file,

Then publish your changes and refresh the site. The reCAPTCHA icon should be disappeared. If not, open the page incognito mode.

Alternatively, you can watch this YouTube video that I made about hiding the reCAPTCHA.

Important note: do not apply display: none. That causes reCAPTCHA to stop functioning.

Still wanna use reCAPTCHA v2?

As stated in the beginning Contact Form 7 has dropped reCAPTCHA v2 support around two years ago. If you still want to use reCAPTCHA v2, you can, but then you can’t use Contact Form 7 anymore. Luckily, there’s a port of Contact Form 7 for reCAPTCHA v2 which is ReCaptcha v2 for Contact Form 7. You can try to use that instead.