Goodbye Google reCAPTCHA, Hello Website Speed
Tags: webdev
Published: 2024-04-22 10:03:17

It's almost impossible to exaggerate what a hot smoking pile of garbage Google's code is. Nothing illustrates this better than my latest work to replace reCAPTCHA with my own custom [PoW based CAPTCHA library](https://ainiro.io/blog/using-bitcoin-and-blockchain-ideas-to-secure-our-ai-chatbot).

Today I finally managed to delete reCAPTCHA entirely. Every part of our website is now using our own PoW-based CAPTCHA with workload 3, implying any client that wants to do something towards our website, needs to generate on average 4,096 SHA256 hash values before a hash with 3 trailing zeros has been successfully generated. The results speaks for themselves.

![Page Speed Insight without Google ReCAPTCHA](https://ainiro.io/assets/images/blog/pow-based-captcha-results-in-page-speed-insights.png)

Notice, with Google reCAPTCHA we were struggling with reaching 75. Now we're in the high 90s.

## The effect on our website

First of all, the effect on our website becomes a drastic improvement on SEO. In addition, we can expect to pay less for ads, win more auctions, and more people clicking our ads will actually be exposed to our website. Let's go through the arguments for these statements.

1. Google and all other search engines will actually prioritise showing websites that loads fast and scores high on web vitals
2. Google and other ad networks will actually charge you less for ads if your site is super high quality on web vitals, and you will win more auctions
3. 50% of all users will click back after having clicked a link if the site doesn't load in 10 seconds or less

Since our site now effectively is _"a bajillion"_ times faster, this implies that the effects of removing reCAPTCHA and creating our own can be assumed to be as follows.

1. We will score better on the SERP
2. We will pay less for ads, and win more auctions
3. More people clicking our ads will actually see the website, and trust in us will increase due to faster load times

It's such a paradox; On the one hand Google will penaltise your website if it's slow. On the other hand, Google's own code is a hot smoking pile of garbage, making your site slow. On top of this, it's almost impossible to find high quality libraries to replace Google's garbage code.

A week ago I replaced [Google Analytics with Plausible](https://dev.to/polterguy/plausible-as-an-alternative-to-google-analytics-2l1p), which of course is _"a bajillion"_ times better on page load than GA. GA is another Google library that's basically garbage. Then over the last week or so, I've been working on my own reCAPTCHA alternative.

Today I made the switch, and got rid of the remaining garbage Google code on our site, and we're now in the high 90s, even _with_ Bootstrap CSS and tons of other JavaScript libraries. I cannot emphasise this strongly enough to you ...

> The best way to make your site perform in Google is to remove all Google code from your website!

This comes in addition to that neither Plausible nor our own PoW-based CAPTCHA solution is using cookies or somehow tracking people in any ways that triggers GDPR, allowing us to have a 100% perfectly GDPR conforming website, without having to display any retarted _"cookie disclaimer garbage"_ ...

> The blissful joy of throwing Google down the toilet 🥳

Google, you are **fundamentally broken**!