How to Create a WordPress Contact Form: 5 Benefits of Contact Form
A contact form is a template that has a predefined field for sending a message to the website owner or admin staff.
A contact form is a means of communication between you and your website visitor.
Visitors can save time by eliminating the lengthy process of sending email messages from their accounts.
Owners can benefit from hiding their email addresses from spammers.
It helps collect data about visitors, such as their name, phone number, email, intent of visiting the website, questions, and suggestions.
Why do You Need a WordPress Contact form?
You may be questioning the need for a contact form on your website when you can display your email address. Why do you make more efforts to add a contact form to your website?
Using a contact form is preferable to displaying our email address for several reasons.
Spam Protection
To send spam emails, spam bots use mailto. The email address on your website allows spammers to send you hundreds of emails.
CAPTCHA is a better method to prevent automated bots in contact forms. For instance, using Google reCAPTCHA in the contact form is an option. In CAPTCHA, it is mandatory to reconfigure an image part or solve a puzzle, which is impossible for a program to solve, and so the program can’t submit the form.
Websites are protected from spam through contact forms.
Capture All Necessary information
People are not always experts in business communications, so in email, people can send information that you don’t need, but leave the information you require. In these circumstances, the information may not be beneficial for business purposes.
But in the case of a form, you can ensure exactly what information you need by creating fields. For further stress, you can create some fields if required.
In the contact form, you can create fields such as their phone number, budget, project details, and other information that you need for your business process.
Email requires you to ask for the information you need, which can be a lengthy process.
In the contact form, you can also add an auto-responder.
Formatted Information
Using a contact form, information can be easily formatted, which can be used for direct processing.
By arranging fields in the required order and information type in the contact form, we can receive information in the proper format and use it for further processing. It is extremely beneficial in a situation where a large number of messages are being received.
Time-Saving:
A contact form field guides the visitor to fill in the information in the required order.
This guide saves visitors’ time by allowing them to send in information without having to think about it.
How to Create a WordPress Contact Form
Adding a WordPress contact form doesn’t require any coding knowledge. It’s simple to add a WordPress contact form using a WordPress contact form plugin. We will mention a few compact form plugins that are easy to use and famous.
WordPress contact form plugins that are both simple and popular include WPForm, Contact Form, Ninja Forms, Contact Form Email, and Formidable Forms.
In this tutorial, we will use the free WPForms version.
How to install WPForms Plugin
Login to WordPress Dashboard
After login go to the Plugins menu option in the left pan
Now hover the mouse over Plugin a sub menu will pop up.
click Add New
In the search box search for the contact form.
You can see list of all contact form plugins, We will install the WPForm plugin.
Click Install and after completing Installation, Click Activate.
After activation, you will see the welcome page. And start a wizard to create a contact form.
We will exit this wizard and start configuring contact form at left pan options. This will also help you know how to create a contact form next time.
How to Create Contact Form with WPForms Plugin
To create a new contact form, click WPForm in the left pan of the WordPress dashboard,
Click + Add New
On the next page, By default Setup is selected.
In the Setup option, you can select a category of contact forms from the inner left pan.
By default, All Templates is selected.
You can select the Blank Form template as shown in the picture below.
Or you can select the Simple Contact Form template as shown in the picture below.
We will use Simple Contact Form, fill form name in the Name Your Form field.
Click Use Template.
Now you can see a simple contact form named Info Contact Form with general input fields, as shown below.
Customizing Contact Form
To customize the contact form select Field in the options under the Setup.
Here you can add more fields to your contact form.
You can add Standard Fields in the free version, and to add Fancy Fields you have to purchase the pro version.
Select Field Options to modify fields.
Now Select the check box field under Comment or Message.
To change the label of the Check Box, fill in the name of the check box in the input box under Label in the left pan field.
For example, we have filled Age in label field. You can see the label of the check box has changed to Age. Now we also change the first check box title to Below 18 years
You can also change other fields according to your needs. You can add images or icons and insert descriptions.
You can move fields up and down, to change the order of the contact form fields.
To change order click the mouse over the field and drag the field up or down. It will change the position of the field as shown in the picture, we have changed the order of the Age field and the Contact or Message field.
Now Age field comes first to the Comments or Message field
In the General tab, you can change more options.
You can make a field required by clicking Clicking the Required Button in the left pan.
In the Advance tab, you can make the following changes.
1. Change field size from Field Size.
2. Add a Placeholder in the field, For example, Your Name in the Name Field.
3. You can add custom CSS Classes.
4. You can Hide the label
5. Hide sub labels.
You can delete or copy a field as shown in the following picture.
Settings For Notification and Confirmation
Set up Notification
When a visitor submits a WordPress contact form he receives an email in his email inbox it is called a contact form notification.
In WPForm you can customize your contact form notification email.
Send to Email Address: It has default value {admin_email}, which means that
Admin will get all email notifications for form submissions. You can add more email addresses to send notifications.
Email Subject Line: It is used to set the Subject line of the form. It is used to recognize which contact form is submitted if you have multiple forms.
From Name: its default value General topic. You can change it to your website or company name.
From Email: Set this field to your WordPress admin email.
Reply-To: This field has default value {field_id=”1”}, which means the sender’s email address.
Email Message: Enter and customize the email body text. You can also add HTML format and use inline CSS
Set up Confirmation
When a visitor submits a contact form a confirmation is a message that a visitor sees. It may be a simple thank you message or redirect page.
With WPForm plugin, emails conformation can be sent automatically when visitors submit forms.
How to Add the WordPress Contact Form to Your Site
To add a WordPress contact form created by a plugin don’t need code to add to the website.
You can add a WordPress Contact Form using three different methods.
It can be added to a new page directly using a block editor, using a short code, or using widgets.
WordPress Block Editor to Add Contact Form
Go to the dashboard side pan, hover over Pages, and click New Page.
Fill page title Contact Form, Click the Publish Button to save the page
Now click + sign
Search for WPForms. Click WPForms icon
You will see a pop-up as seen in the next screen.
Select your Contact Form Name in the drop-down menu. We will select the Info Contact Form, contact form that we have created
To save change click Update.
Your contact page has been created you can visit the contact form page, It will look as shown in the picture below.
Conclusion
Adding a contact form to your website will protect it from spammers. It also enhances the user experience by providing instructions on how and what information to fill in the contact form.
In this article, we have provided a simple process for creating a contact form and displaying it on your website’s Contact Us page.
We hope this tutorial will help you create a contact form for your website.