How to Add a WordPress Contact Form

How to Add a Contact Form in WordPress (The Easy Way)

Do you want to add a contact form in WordPress 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:

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  1. User-friendly: Imagine your users copying your email address and 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 messages and hit send immediately. It’s way more convenient and keeps users from navigating away from your site.
  2. Spam Protection: Using 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!
  3. 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.

WPForms

Here’s a summary of why WPForms is the best contact form plugin:

  1. It’s the most beginner-friendly, feature-rich contact form plugin available
  2. You can create simple contact forms to advanced forms easily without needing to touch any code
  3. It comes in both a free and premium version, 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.

add-wpforms-to-wordpress

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.

activate-wpforms-to-add-contact-form-wordpress

Then, you’ll see a welcome page appear on your screen and a WPForms menu in your WordPress admin area.

welcome-wpforms-how-to-add-contact-form-in-wordpress

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.

add-new-form-wordpress-contact-page

It’ll open the form setup page. Enter your form name and select the Simple Contact Form.

wpforms-form-setup

This will open the 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.

wpforms-form-builder-how-to-add-a-contact-form-in-wordpress

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 add additional fields to your contact form simply by dragging them from the left to the right.

If you’re using WPForms Lite, you can only access the standard fields on your form. If you want to use Fancy Fields and Payment Fields, you must 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.

wpforms-field-options

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 on your site.

To configure your form notifications, go to Settings » Notifications in your form creation area.

wpforms-notifications

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.

wpforms-confirmation

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 on 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 use the Classic editor in your post or page editor, click the Add Form button.

how-to-add-contact-form-wordpress

A popup box will appear. Select the contact form you want to add and click the Add Form button.

insert-form

A contact form shortcode will be added to your page content. Now, go ahead and save your page.

wpforms-shortcode

Then you can open/ preview the page to see how your contact form looks. Here’s how it looks using the default WordPress theme.

contact-form-preview

If you’re using the Gutenberg block editor, add the WPForms widget.

WPForms Block in WordPress

Now, you just need to click on the drop-down menu to select the form you want.

WPForms WordPress Block - Select your form

There, that’s how to add a contact form to 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.

Go to Appearance » Widgets in your WordPress dashboard and navigate to the WPForms widget.

wpforms-widget

Then, drag the widget to the sidebar area on the right-hand side of the page.

Add the title for your widget, select your form from the drop-down menu, and click the Save button.

add-widget

That’s it!

Track Your WordPress Form Conversions

Now that you’ve added a contact form to 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 and the conversion rate for your forms. Plus, you can see which form collects 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.

monsterinsights-how-add-contact-form-in-wordpress

It has a 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.

MonsterInsights Forms Report

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.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I add a contact form to WordPress?

To add a contact form to WordPress, you can install a contact form plugin from the WordPress dashboard. Search for a plugin, install it, and then use its interface to create and insert a form into your pages or posts.

Does WordPress have a built-in contact form?

WordPress doesn’t include a built-in contact form in its core features. However, adding a contact form is straightforward by using plugins available.

Is there a free contact form for WordPress?

Yes, there is a free contact form for WordPress. WPForms offers a lite version that’s available for free. It’s easy to use and lets you create basic contact forms quickly.

What is the best contact form plugin for WordPress?

The best contact form plugin for WordPress is WPForms. It’s user-friendly, powerful, and offers a wide range of features in its free and premium versions, making it a great choice for any WordPress site.

And that’s it!

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.

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Comments

  1. 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.

    1. 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.

  2. 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?

    1. 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.

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