It’s important to have a contact form on your website so visitors can easily get in touch with you. Since I use WordPress for all my websites, this tutorial will show you how to create a contact form in WordPress. It’s simple, free, and it looks great!
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The Importance Of Contact Forms
Installing a contact form on your website, rather than just supplying your email address, is more effective in gathering customer information. It allows your visitors to remain on your site longer, and doesn’t require your user to redirect to their personal email account. Another perk is that your visitors can take advantage of their browser’s auto-fill function, and your email address won’t be visible to spammers.
You can decide what information to include on your form, such as, first name, last name, email address, home address, phone number, website address, and subject line. I like to keep my form simple. You can see what fields I’ve used below. You’ll also want to include a comment or message box in which your visitors can add their message. The next step is to hit “send,” and you’re done! 
Create A Contact Form In WordPress
Contact Form 7 is the plugin I use. It’s one of the oldest and most downloaded WordPress plugins – it allows you to manage and customize multiple contact forms. You don’t have to be a coder to install it, and only one simple line of shortcode is needed. Paste this code into your text editor and you’re done! The form can be added to your contact page or your sidebar by using a widget.
Here’s what the shortcode looks like:
[contact-form-7 id=”32″ title=”Contact form 1″]
Spammers are everywhere. It’s a shame we have to worry about this, but the reality is we do. Contact Form 7 provides powerful anti-spam features. It blocks annoying spambots by supporting reCAPTCHA, while also providing Akismet spam-filtering. You can use comment blacklist to block messages that contain specific keywords, or messages sent from certain IP addresses.
Keep in mind, this plugin doesn’t archive sent messages so there is a chance you may lose important messages if your mail server encounters problems. You can prevent this from happening by installing a storage plugin like Flamingo that saves all your sent messages via your contact form.
Advantages Of Using Contact 7
The most obvious advantage to this plugin is that it’s free. While it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of other contact forms, Contact 7 makes it easy to create a basic form for your blog or website. Easy is a big deal, especially if you’re in the initial stages of building a website, and are in a state of overwhelm.
If you’re more advanced, you can customize your form using HTML or CSS. This is useful if you want to add more fields to your form, or just alter the look. You can also do this by modifying the code.
Add-On Plugins For Contact Form 7
Contact 7 supports several third-party plugins, and most but not all, of these add-on plugins are free:
1. Contact Form 7 Conditional Fields – this plugin adds conditional logic to your contact form. When editing your form, you’ll see additional tags you can edit. Conditional Fields is useful if you want to obtain specific information from those who are using your form.
2. Contact Form 7 Honeypot – this plugin decreases spam without the use of annoying CAPTCHAs or other questions. Add a {honeypot} tag to your form to create an invisible text field. This field should be left blank. If not, the submission is considered spam.
3. Contact Form 7 For PayPal Add-on – one of my favorite add-ons, this plugin is a must if you don’t have an eCommerce store, but are selling one or two products on your site. Used in conjunction with your contact form, this add-on directs your customers to PayPal to make an online purchase.
4. Contact Form 7 MailChimp Extension – if you’re using the MailChimp automation platform for email marketing this plugin is for you. Not only can you collect information from your visitors, you can also get them to automatically subscribe to your MailChimp lists. This user-friendly plugin has custom fields and supports multiple mailing lists.
5. Contact Form 7 Skins – Contact Form 7 is a great plugin, but is very basic. This add-on plugin has a wide range of templates and styles to design both simple and complex forms – no coding is necessary.
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Key Points
Content Form 7 may be for you if you’re new to WordPress, and are looking for a basic, but flexible form, to install on your site. It doesn’t take a lot of mental prowess to install and it gets the job done. Take advantage of the many add-on plugins available to Contact 7 Form users. You’ll then have all the functionality you could ask for.
What contact form do you use? Let me know in the comments:)
This is a very helpful article. I didn’t know it was so important to have a contact form. I’ve never heard about this plugin until I read your post. I’m going to give this plugin a try. Thanks for this information.
After reading this I understand why it’s so important to make sure your audience can easily contact you. It adds a second layer of trust and makes you seem more approachable. Very well written.
Thank you Ruth,
If you’re looking for a user-friendly plugin, Contact Form 7 is a good one. It’s essential that you website visitors be able to contact you, that way you build trust and familiarity with your audience. Give the plugin a try!
I also use contact form 7 for my contact forms. I feel that this form was one of the easier ones to set up. Now that you are also endorsing it, I realize I made the right choice in picking the form.
I didn’t realize that contact forms help people stay longer on my site. But after reading what you’ve written I realize it actually does. Because they are going out of their way to contact me which means they must be interested in what I’m saying.
Thank you for helping me realize that.
Hi Jag,
Contact Form 7 is definitely easy to set up which is always nice. You’re right, contact forms will keep people on your site longer, and they’re much more likely to contact you if you have an a form on your website that’s readily accessible.
Thanks so much for reading!
Thanks for the tutorial on how to create a contact form, Contact Form 7 on WordPress. I also think it is important that the audience can contact the website owner directly, which increases credibility and will eventually result in a conversion.
The only thing that concerns me is will this additional plug slow down my site when loading? I have so many plug ins already and some tend to slow down page loading. We will see, I am going to give it a try and will let you know if it slows down my site or not.
Yes, it is super important that website owners can be contacted directly. It’s just good business. Before installing any plugin make sure it’s compatible with your version of WordPress.
You can use a website speed site – PageSpeed Insights – to check you website speed before and after you activate the plugin. That way you’ll know for sure if the plugin does or doesn’t slow down your site.
Thanks for taking the time to comment!