Orange error: There was an error trying to send your message. Please try again

See Contact Form 7 5.1.1 – theme needs to properly loads JavaScript in the footer area of each page.

Switch temporarily (nothing will be lost when you switch back) to a WP default theme to see if the problem goes away.

If this fixes the problem & you can’t get your theme fixed, you might try <using Contact Form 7 – reCaptcha v2 in addition to Contact Form 7. Once installed and configured it offers the same reCaptcha functionality you are used to in previous versions of Contact Form 7 (recommended by CF7 plugin author).

If using default theme doesn’t stop the error, you could have a general WP email sending problem. See If You Have Email Problems – most people that work carefully through this list of email sending issues are able to solve their particular problems.

Based Neil’s note, think the issue is with recaptcha. I checked with the default 2019 WordPress theme and the form still failed with the orange box. I checked the footer on my theme and it has the wp_footer call. So I disabled recaptcha (deleted my keys) and the form works.

I haven’t checked the email problems link, but based on what I’ve submitted above, it would seem to be a recaptcha issue and not an email issue?

Solved.

The problem in my case was incorrect API keys. I didn’t realize you need to create a new set of API keys for V3. This wasn’t obvious to me, so I had entered by V2 keys. I didn’t get any errors upon doing this (at least not in the integration section).

So, if you’re a little thick (i.e. not Google employee material), like me, and you’re getting this error, make sure you’ve generated new API keys.