How to add a contact form to your site

Jul 07, 2020 · 3 mins read

You may want a form on your website that your visitors can fill to leave you a quick message. There are a number of plugins that will help you setup such a form. Some of the most poplar options are Contact Form 7, WPForms, Ninja Forms and HTML Forms.

Each of those plugins can be found for free when you search their name under Plugins > Add new in you Wordpress admin. We have another article about How to Choose the best plugin that you may want to read as well.

Contact form 7

This is by far the most used plugin to make a contact form on your website, and it’s completely free! Once the plugin is installed and activated it will add a “Contact” menu to your WpAdmin where you can create and manage your forms.

You will get to see some HTML code when setting up the form, but you can use the buttons above the form builder to help you generate the code. This makes it very flexible to use, especially if you have some limited knowledge of HTML and CSS code.

Under the Mail tab you can set where the form should be send, each form can be set to send to a different email address.

WPForms

If you don’t want to deal with any HTML code, WPForms may be a good option for you. It has a “drag and drop” editor to create the forms and is generally very user friendly. The free version of this plugin is enough for most users.

You can set the email you want the forms to send to under WPForms > Settings > Notifications. All the forms will end up at this same email address. If you have the paid version you also see the entries within your WpAdmin under WPForms > Entries.

Ninja Forms

Another user friendly contact form plugin that is free and easy to use. It also features a drag and drop form editor. Each form has it’s own settings where you set what email this form should be submitted to. Go to Ninja Forms > Dashboard, click the gear icon next to the form you want to edit, and choose “Edit”. When in the form editor there is a tab on top of the screen “Email & Actions” where you can setup what should happen when someone submits the form.

Just like with WPForms you can also see the form entries via your WpAdmin, under Ninja Forms > Submissions. A nice extra feature for NinjaForms is that you can Import and Export form submissions for CSV via Ninja Forms > Import/export. You can open the CSV file in Excel or Google Sheets or import it into an email marketing system or customer relationship management system and such.

Html Forms by ibericode

Created for developers to have a quick way to add forms to a website and still have full flexibility. While this plugin is less user friendly for a normal blogger, it is the most user friendly plugin for developers that prefer to write their own HTML code.

The form is submitted by Ajax. You can see the form submissions within WpAdmin, and receive an email notification for each submission.

An “Email action” is included by default, and it’s pretty easy to add your own custom form actions via PHP code if needed. This is what makes the plugin so powerful for developers.

Troubleshooting

If you are not receiving the emails when you test the form you’ve created, first you should double check the settings of the form itself, to see if you set it to send to the correct email.

Let’s fist check if your Wordpress setup can send out emails by using the Check Email plugin. Go to Plugins > Add new search for “Check Email” and install the plugin by MachoThemes.

Now you can go to Tools > Check Email and send a test email to a few different email boxes you may have and see if any error is shown there, and if the email actually arrives at your mailbox. If the test emails never arrive, your hosting provider may have blocked your Wordpress from sending emails. You can ask them to fix that for you, or you can use a plugin like WP Mail SMTP by WPForms. That plugin will allow you to setup your Wordpress site to send the email via another email provider, such as via your free Gmail account, or many other services.