Hi reidwalley,

What you describe most often happens when reCAPTCHA’s scripts are being loaded twice on the page — reCAPTCHA doesn’t handle this well, and so it will appear but not function properly. This usually happens when reCAPTCHA comes built into a theme, though sometimes it can come from another plugin. There are a couple of options for next steps:

1) As you already did, you can deactivate reCAPTCHA as a fast and simple solution. If you’d like, you can use the WordPress Zero Spam plugin instead. This can be a good option in that it’s free, we have out-of-the-box integration (you only have to install and activate it), and it doesn’t add any CAPTCHA that users have to see or fill out.

2) You can check is whether reCAPTCHA is part of your theme, as many themes like this provide an option to turn it off. I usually will start with a Google search of ‘[theme name] recaptcha’ or just hunt around through the theme options when available.

If you opt for the second option but you’re not able to locate anything like this, we can help you to troubleshoot further. In this case, please contact us here (using the right-hand option – ‘complete a form’ button).

Thanks! 🙂