In this article and the video that goes with it, I’m going to show you how to create a contact form for your WordPress website.
If you want your website visitors to communicate with you, a contact form is one of the best ways to accomplish this but by default, WordPress does not come with a contact from built in. Despite this fact, there’s obviously a WordPress Plugin for that, actually, there’s a lot of plugins that can add this type of functionality. There are both free and premium options to look at. In this article and video, I demonstrate the Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin which is free on the official WordPress Website.
Installing the Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin
I recommend taking a look at the video to see the actual demonstration which walks you through the installation and configuration of the plugin.
The Steps to follow
- Go to your website dashboard
- then go to the plugins link in the left side of the admin dashboard
- click add new
- Then in the search field type out “contact form 7“
- press return or enter
- then you will see the contact forms 7 plugin as the first option.
The Contact Form 7 Plugin is active on over 1 million WordPress installations, it has a lot of good reviews, it’s recently updated and if you want to view more details you can click the link to view more.
Install the plugin and then activate it. Once you activate it you will see you have a contact link in the admin sidebar. By default, the Contacts Form 7 Plugin comes with one contact form already created for you. If you just want to use the one that comes by default, you can just copy the Shortcode provided and go to or create a page where you want to display your contact form. In the video, I go to the contact page I already created and I edit it. Then paste the Shortcode in the page and then click update. Then view the page to ensure the contact form is as you expected.
In the video demo there’s the name field, email field, subject field, the your message section and the send button. This will be enough for the vast majority of people. The Contact Form 7 Plugin is very simple to use out-of-the-box. The default Shortcode that you can use for your contact form might be enough but if you want to customize it by adding some additional fields, that’s also very easy to do.
Customize or Add a New Form
- Go back to the dashboard
- then go to the contact form link in the left sidebar
- You can either create a new contact form by clicking the Add New Link or you can just edit the one that was just pasted in the contact page.
In the video, I add a new contact form. I call it “contact form two”. I then go over the options it has in the four sections by clicking the tabs. The first one is for the form itself. If you look at the HTML code, this is what a regular HTML form would look like. You have your html label opening and closing tags, you have the text that’s presented in the contact form itself and then there’s square brackets with a string of text identifying the field. You have the same thing for email, the subject and for the message.
What if you also want to have a telephone number field?
- you can copy any of the code snippets for the other fields
- make some space
- paste it in the location you want it placed
- then you’re going to title it “your telephone number”
- then you’re going to want to delete the string of text between the label tags in the square brackets because now you’re adding the telephone option there.
You will have to leave your cursor in that location and then click on the telephone tab. You can choose to make it required or not. In the name field itself give the default value if you want. I insert the tag and save it. I then move onto the next section which is the email section. The email is going to go to your admin email address and is from the individual that filled out the form. In the video I go over the settings.
But now you also have to add the telephone parameter so it will be included. The contact forms 7 plugin highlights the telephone tab in a darker format that’s grayed out. Copy that and paste it right underneath your message. Paste it and then now you will be able to get that filled out as well. Save that option and it’ll be included.
Now you have all the fields filled out properly. You see that now the telephone option is grayed out as we have included it in the message body itself and the same can be done for any of the other options. You just highlight one of the snippet examples and paste it wherever you want it to be displayed in the form. Then you would have the cursor located right in between the opening and closing label tags and you choose whichever option you want.
Then you would save it and go to the email section and make sure you included it inside the message body and the messages that a person will receive based on what they filled out in the contact form. So if they are successful they’ll get the success message. If the message failed they’ll get the failed message. If you want to change the default message, you can do that just by typing in the information then save at the bottom. If you want to add additional settings you can do that as well. You can go to the additional settings page and you will see the options. If you make any changes, just save everything.
Then save the form itself and you’ll have a new Shortcode available to you. You can just click on it and then copy it. Go back to that same contact page, edit the page and remove the original Shortcode. Paste the new Shortcode where you want it in the page. Update the page, view it in the browser and now you will see that you have it with your new form fields added. You have the your name field, email address field, telephone number field, subject field and the send button.
Contact Form 7 makes it really simple to create a contact form for your WordPress powered website.
To recap
- go to plugins
- add a new plugin
- search for the contact form 7
- install & activate it
- then decide if you want to customize it or if you want to use the default form
So that’s pretty much it. This is a very good plugin to use and it’s very popular, very effective, it’s customizable and you can create as many contact forms as you want; it just works. It’s one of the most well reviewed plugins and there’s a lot of documentation about it. As you can see it’s an easy way to create a contact form for your WordPress website.
Hopefully you found this article and video helpful where I demonstrated how to use the contact forms 7 plugin to create a very easy to use contact form for your WordPress website. Watch the video and give it a thumbs up if you found it helpful. Don’t forget to subscribe because I’ll be giving you more tips and tricks on how to manage your WordPress website.