Do you want to add a contact form on your WordPress site to stay in touch with your users?
By adding a contact form to your site, you provide an easy way for your site visitors to express their questions or concerns. Allowing people to communicate makes for a better user experience and gives you valuable feedback.
In this article, we’ll show you how to create a WordPress contact form using a plugin. This allows complete beginners to build contact forms and other forms without any previous experience.
Why Create a WordPress Contact Form?
WordPress contact forms make your site easy to use and help with conversion rate optimization. How? Here are a few reasons contact forms are awesome:
- User-friendly: Imagine your users copying your email address, and then opening their email account to send you an email. It’s a tedious process with several steps. On the other hand, a contact form provides a ready-to-use place for users to enter their message and hit send immediately. It’s way more convenient, and keeps users from navigating away from your site.
- Spam Protection: If you use a well-designed contact form, you can defend yourself from pesky spambots. Weed out the spam before it has a chance to hit your inbox!
- Organized Information: When people email you, they use their own unique style and structure to communicate. That can be hard to process and interpret. A contact form provides more organized and consistent information. Since you design the form fields and information flow, you get exactly what you need from users.
Now, let’s check out the steps to create a WordPress contact form, install it on your site, and track your form submissions.
Video Tutorial
Not interested in watching the video? Keep reading for our detailed written tutorial on adding contact forms in WordPress.
How to Add a Contact Form in WordPress
Adding a WordPress contact form is easy and requires no coding! Follow these steps and your contact form will be ready in no time.
Step 1: Choose the Best Contact Form Plugin
The first thing you’ll need to do is choose the best contact form plugin for your site.
With so many form plugin choices available, the process of finding the right one for your needs can be an exhausting process.
So, for your convenience, we’ve reviewed and handpicked the best contact form plugins for you. You can choose any of the top plugins from our list and the steps should be similar.
We’ve chosen WPForms for this tutorial, since we picked it as the best contact form plugin for WordPress.
Here’s a summary of why WPForms is the best contact form plugin:
- It’s the most beginner-friendly, feature-rich contact form plugin available
- You can create simple contact forms to advanced forms easily without needing to touch any code
- It comes in both a free and premium versions, so you have multiple options for choosing a suitable plan
Now that we’ve decided on the WPForms contact form plugin, let’s go ahead and install it on your site.
Step 2: Install the Contact Form Plugin on Your Site
To start, open your WordPress dashboard and install the WPForms Lite plugin by going to Plugins » Add New.
In the search field, type WPForms to find the plugin. It’s the one with Sullie the bear waving at you.
Once you find the right one, click the Install Now button.
After it’s installed, you’ll need to click Activate to complete the installation process.
Then, you’ll see a welcome page appear on your screen and a WPForms menu in your WordPress admin area.
Step 3: Create a Contact Form in WordPress
Now that you’ve successfully installed WPForms, you’re ready to make a contact form in WordPress.
Go to WPForms » Add New in your WordPress admin area.
It’ll open form setup page. Enter your form name and select the Simple Contact Form.
This will open WPForms drag and drop form builder, and there you’ll see a ready-to-use simple contact form. It’s a pre-made form in WPForms.
The pre-made form has several basic fields included by default: Name, Email, and Message box. If this suits your needs, you can go ahead and click the Save button at the top.
Here, you can also add additional fields to your contact form simply by dragging them from the left-hand side panel to the right-hand side panel.
If you’re using WPForms Lite, you only have access to the standard fields on your form. If you want to use Fancy Fields and Payment Fields, you’ll need to purchase WPForms Pro. It allows you to create advanced forms like order forms, donation forms, survey forms, etc.
If you want to customize the form, you can simply drag the fields and reorder them. Also, you can customize the form fields by clicking the Field Options tab.
Once you’re done customizing, you can save it.
Step 4: Configure Form Notifications and Confirmations
Now that you’ve created your contact form, you’ll need to configure your form notifications and confirmations properly.
A form notification is an email you’ll get after a user submits a message via the contact form your site.
To configure your form notifications, go to Settings » Notifications in your form creation area.
You’ll see default settings already there which you can simply leave untouched if you want the administrator email to receive the messages. This feature makes it easy for beginners.
Also of interest: a form confirmation is what your website visitor sees after submitting a message via the form on your site. It can be a thank you email, display a page, or redirect them to a specific URL.
To configure your form confirmation, go to Settings » Confirmation in your form creation area.
You can see the form confirmation type Message by default which you can leave as is or change it to Show page or Go to URL.
If you made any changes, make sure to click the Save button.
Step 5: Add Your WordPress Contact Form in a Page
Now that you’ve created and configured your contact form settings, let’s look at
how to add a form to a page in WordPress.
So, create a new page or open to edit an existing page where you want to add the contact form.
If you’re using the Classic editor, in your post or page editor, go to the Add Form button and click it.
A popup box will appear. Select the contact form you want to add and click the Add Form button.
A contact form shortcode will be added to your page content. Now go ahead and save your page.
Then you can open/ preview the page to see how your contact form looks. Here’s how it looks using the default WordPress theme.
If you’re using the Gutenberg block editor, add the WPForms widget.
Now, you just need to click on the drop down menu to select the form you want.
There, that’s how to add a contact form in a WordPress page or post quickly and easily with WPForms.
Step 6: Add Your Contact Form in Sidebars
Now, if you want to add your contact form in the sidebars or other widget-ready areas, like your site’s footer, you can use the WPForms widget.
In your WordPress dashboard, go to Appearance » Widgets and navigate to the WPForms widget.
Then, drag the widget to the sidebar area on the right-hand side of the page.
Add the title for your widget and select your form from the drop down menu and click the Save button.
That’s it!
Track Your WordPress Form Conversions
Now that you’ve added a contact form on your site, it’s important to know how your contact forms are doing.
By tracking your WordPress contact forms, you can see the total number of views and conversions your forms are triggering as well as the conversion rate for your forms. Plus, you can see which form is collecting the most views and submissions and its conversion rates.
If you’d like to get started with forms tracking, the best way is to use the MonsterInsights Google Analytics plugin.
It has powerful forms tracking addon that automatically tracks your form conversions.
It’s a user-friendly tool that you can configure in just a few clicks without having to touch any code. Just install and activate MonsterInsights Forms, and the plugin will start tracking your forms automatically.
Not to mention, it integrates with WPForms as well as all the other WordPress form plugins.
Read our complete guide on how to track WordPress form conversions for beginners.
We hope this article helped you learn how to create a WordPress contact form. If you liked this article, you might want to check out our complete guide on how to track conversions in Google Analytics.
And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube for more helpful WordPress and Google Analytics tips.
Do you know how to get them to display in Category description section? It is just displaying as the code.
Also, when I tested it, I never received an email that the form was filled out. Contact form is pointless if it doesn’t come to me.
TIA for any insight.
Hi Emersyn,
Forms can be embedded in posts, pages, and widgets, but a category description section won’t output the form. As far as not receiving the emails, try:
Check that your form notification settings are configured correctly by following this tutorial.
If your notification settings are correct, the issue is likely because the emails sent from WordPress are not authenticated (unlike emails sent directly from dedicated email service providers). As a result, they are likely to be filtered by the receiving mail server.
To resolve email delivery issues like this, you can configure a SMTP plugin on your site so that emails are sent as authenticated. WPForms has an article with a list of recommended SMTP options and links to their setup tutorials.
For any further help, you can reach out to WPForms.
I have pages of our organization’s board members with names and contacts. I want to add an email for each contact. Do I create a separate form for each name?
Hi Rita – You could either create one form with a selector field to choose which person you want to contact, or you could create a separate form for each page. With WPForms you can easily duplicate a form, so if you went that route, it would be easy to duplicate your form and just make the couple updates for each separate person.