hCaptcha: An Intelligent, Private CAPTCHA Alternative To Google ReCAPTCHA
If you’ve been a long-time visitor, you’ve probably noticed the significant changes I’ve made to the site. My last theme was outdated and the company disappeared that supported it so I installed a new theme and have been iterating through migrating all of the customizations.
Simultaneously, I’ve also been working on improving the site’s speed to improve the visitor experience and increase the site speed. Ultimately, both should lead to improved search rankings and revenue from the ads and affiliate offerings on the site.
A fantastic partner in this endeavor has been Ezoic, a monetization platform for publishers. Their platform analyzes your site for performance issues and provides alternative solutions. A few of the issues that I had were directly attributable to the form solution I was using:
- Gravity Forms was loading extraneous script and styling on every page whether or not there was a form on it. I upgraded my site to Formidable Forms because it offered its solution with the option of only loading those additional assets on a page with an actual form.
- Google Fonts were loading on site despite me not using them in my theme and even having disabled them. While I could have used site inspection tools through my browser developer tools to figure them out, I instead happened across this Google Fonts Checker. It immediately showed me that the Google fonts were being loaded via Google reCAPTCHA on my forms.