No matter what kind of website you run, a contact form is a must for all the websites. It provides a medium for your website visitors, advertisers or potential clients to contact you.
Table of Contents
Importance of contact form on your WordPress website
- Prevent spam – A contact form is a great alternative to sharing your email address publicly on your website. It prevents spam bots from scraping your email and bombarding you with spam.
- Communication – Contact forms provide your website visitors a medium to contact you easily. It helps keep a communication channel open between you and your website visitors.
- Save time – Through contact forms you can collect important data that you will need before being able to reply to someone. This will help you save time by reducing the same messages being sent to everyone.
Choosing a plugin
By default WordPress doesn’t come with a contact form. But through a plugin you can easily integrate a contact form on your website. We will be using the WPForms plugin for adding a form to our website.
With over 3+ million active installations and 5 star rating on the WordPress plugin store you should get an idea of the popularity of this plugin. Some of its features include:
- Drag and drop contact form builder which lets you build a form easily.
- The plugin comes with pre-built contact forms which helps save your time in designing a custom contact form from scratch.
- The contact forms are mobile-responsive and SEO friendly.
- Many features such as file upload field, star ratings, multi-page forms and many more.
Below are steps to create a contact form on your WordPress website
- Install and activate the WPForms plugin.
- A WPForms menu will be added to the admin sidebar. Navigate to WPForms -> Add New.
- In the Form Name field enter the form name and in the Select a Template section, select the template you want to use. We will go with the Simple Contact Form template since it will have the basic form fields already added to it.
- A form should now be loaded with fields such as Name, Email, Message and a Submit button. You can drag the fields to change their order or delete them if you don’t want any field.
- From the left side bar under the Add Fields tab you can also drag and drop additional form fields that you might need in the form.
- Once the form is ready click on the Save button.
Configuring the plugin settings
Once the form is created you will need to configure a few additional settings such as showing a message on form submission and getting email notifications after form submission.
To configure the message on form submission, navigate to Settings tab in WPForms form builder. Click on the Confirmations option. Mostly the default option of a Thank You message is fine but if you want any other page to be shown then you can change the page in the Confirmation Page dropdown and select the page you want to display.
Similarly for getting email notifications on form submission click on the Notifications option. Again the default settings will be fine and the emails will be sent to the Admin email of the website. If you want the notifications sent to another email then you can change them in the form.
Adding the form to a page
Once the form is created and configured you will need to add the contact form to a page to display it on your website. Create a new page on WordPress and click on the add a new block option. In the Widgets section click on the WPForms option. Simply select the contact form that we created earlier and publish the page.
Your contact form is now live on your WordPress website and anyone can use it to contact you easily. You can also use the WPForms shortcode to add the contact form to any part of your website.