Change the reCAPTCHA theme and language
Updated September 13, 2026
The reCAPTCHA widget has two appearance controls. The theme is a setting you choose at Settings › reCAPTCHA WooCommerce, and the language is set automatically from your site’s WordPress language.
Switch between the light and dark themes
Use the reCAPTCHA Theme dropdown under API Key Settings. Light is the default and gives the familiar grey and white box. Dark gives a dark grey box with light text, which sits better on dark checkout designs.
The choice applies to every form the plugin protects. There is no per-form theme setting.
Google renders the widget inside an iframe, so its internal styling cannot be overridden with your theme’s CSS. The dark option is the only way to change its colours.
How the language is chosen
The plugin passes your site’s locale to Google when it loads the reCAPTCHA script, so the widget’s text matches the language set at Settings › General › Site Language. A site set to French shows the challenge in French with no extra configuration.
The value used is the WordPress locale for the current request, which on a multilingual site means the language of the page the visitor is viewing rather than a single fixed language.
If the widget shows the wrong language
Check three things in order:
- Confirm Settings › General › Site Language is set to the language you expect.
- Clear any page or CDN cache. The reCAPTCHA script URL includes the language code, so a cached page can carry a stale one.
- Check whether Google supports that locale. Google falls back to English for locales it does not have translations for.
Another plugin loading its own copy of the reCAPTCHA API script can also win the race and set the language. If you have a second CAPTCHA plugin active, disable one of them.
Translating the plugin’s own text
The error messages the plugin adds, such as “Please complete the reCAPTCHA to verify that you are not a robot.”, come from the plugin rather than from Google. They use the recaptcha-woo text domain and can be translated through the WordPress translation project at translate.wordpress.org, or overridden in your own code with the standard gettext filters.