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Even in today’s digital landscape, communication doesn’t set its value just for convenience; it is still a necessity.
For every WordPress user, creating a contact form is a pivotal step, as it helps establish effective connections with website visitors, keep a strategized track of the sales analyzing form submission, and target the audience accordingly.
This comprehensive guide will help you to checkbox each of these vital marketing tactics by emphasizing the importance of contact and the step-by-step process of adding a contact form to the WordPress website.
Why is it Important to Create Contact Form in WordPress?
Having a contact form on the WordPress website is the bridge that enables the audience to connect with you. It also benefits conducting meaningful interactions, including from queries to direct inbound leads.
Let’s understand the significance of creating a WordPress contact form in a more detailed version:
1. Enhanced User Experience (UX)
How will your business be able to make practical sales if users don’t know a way to contact you? A well-structured contact form simplifies this reach, offering a user-friendly and intuitive interface to drop inquiries, resulting in an increased number of repetitive users.
2. Establish Brand Trust
Displaying a contact form on the WordPress site demonstrates professionalism and accessibility. It reassures visitors that they can reach out if they have questions, concerns, or inquiries, which is crucial for building trust.
3. Collect Relevant Information
Contact forms build a two-way street; they not only facilitate the users a way to connect but also profit businesses by conducting targeted data collection.
By customizing the form field options, you can gather specific information from users, such as their names, email addresses, and the service/product they are interested in.
This user data is invaluable for tailoring responses, understanding the audience, and improving marketing strategies.
4. Streamline Customer Queries
Customer queries are the most unpredictable element when running a WordPress website.
Having an effective WordPress form creates a competitive edge here. It ensures that inquiries, messages, and feedback reach the correct department and get answered within the timeline.
This optimization leads to reduced frustration for both business owners and web visitors, – ultimately resulting in improved customer satisfaction.
5. Reduce Spam
Protecting your website from spam helps maintain user integrity. Providing a contact form can significantly reduce the risk of spam compared to displaying raw email addresses.
This enhances the website’s security and ensures receiving legitimate inquiries.
6. Compliance and Privacy
Nowadays, as every B2B to B2C trading has hopped online – data protection and privacy have become the most important factors to safeguard.
By interlinking the ‘privacy policy’ page within the form submission, users get assurance of how and where their data will be used.
It ensures compliance with data protection regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This transparency builds trust and safeguards your visitors’ privacy, demonstrating your commitment to their security.
7. Mobile-Friendly Interaction
With over 55% of internet users accessing websites on mobile devices, it’s crucial to offer a seamless experience across platforms.
Regardless of the dimensions, setting up a responsive WordPress contact form benefits by converting a potential customer base from any device layout. This mobile-friendliness caters to a diverse audience and also enhances user experience.
Moving forward to choosing the right WordPress plugin to set up a contact form in WordPress – which is clearly the Contact Form 7.
Why Choose Contact Form 7 Plugin to Setup Contact Form in WordPress?
Undoubtedly, there are several other contact form plugins WordPress offers, such as Everest Forms, Ninja Forms, and WPForms Lite. But by overcoming each of them, Contact Form 7 offers many other out-of-box functionalities – let’s dive a bit deeper!
1. Extensive Customization Options
One size rarely fits all in today’s evolving digital world. Contact Form 7 provides a wide range of form field customization features, allowing you to tailor the contact form to match the web design, branding, and unique requirements.
2. Integration Capabilities
No website operates in solitude. Contact Form 7 recognizes this and offers seamless integration with third-party plugins and services.
Whether you want to connect the contact forms to email marketing platforms, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, or any other than that, Contact Form 7 has got you covered.
Integration offered by this form builder expands the functionality of the forms, enhancing the website’s overall capabilities and empowering to streamline your workflow.
3. Multi-Language Support
The internet is a global space, and reaching a diverse regional audience is often a priority for businesses aiming for massive establishment. Contact Form 7 supports this goal by allowing you to create forms in multiple languages.
Even if you have a simple contact form, Contact Form 7 opens each possible scaling opportunity for you, no matter if you are targeting a local or international audience.
4. Reliability and Performance
Contact Form 7 is a well-established and trusted plugin with a track record of reliability and performance.
You can count on it to handle the website’s communication needs, even during periods of high traffic or intense user interactions getting used as a registration form or on the ‘Contact Us’ page.
5. Cost-Effective
Budget boundaries should never restrict effective communication between business owners and audiences. Contact Form 7 plugin understands this term very well – while offering a free version and open source, making it budget-friendly and suiting each business size.
How to Setup Contact Form in WordPress Using Contact Form 7 Plugin?
Now that we’ve established the importance of contact forms and the advantages of Contact Form 7 – let’s walk through the step-by-step process of setting up Contact Form 7 on the WordPress website:
Step 1: Install and Activate Contact Form 7
- Start by logging into your WordPress admin dashboard by adding /wp-admin to the end of your domain URL. If that doesn’t work, there are multiple ways you can find WordPress login URL.
- Once you are in, on the left-hand menu, navigate to the ‘Plugins‘ tab
- Tap on the ‘Add New‘ button available on the top.
- In the search bar at the top right, type ‘Contact Form 7‘.
- Start the plugin installation process, once done – tap on ‘Activate‘.
Step 2: Create Your Contact Form
- Once Contact Form 7 is activated, you’ll find a new tab in your WordPress dashboard menu called ‘Contact‘.
- Clicking on the ‘Contact’ tab, you’ll get access to the Contact Forms management page.
- By default, Contact Form 7 provides a Sample Form template that you can use as a starting point or create a new one.
- For the purpose of this guide, let’s create a new form by clicking the ‘Add New‘ option at the top of the page.
- Give your form a descriptive name in the ‘Name‘ field. These contact forms can be used for multiple purposes, such as registration form, subscriptions, or a particular WordPress page. This name will help you to get references and identify the form later.
- Customize the content of your form in the ‘Form‘ field. This is where you’ll design the contact form by adding form fields and other elements. You can use predefined tags to insert form fields.
- After customizing your form, click the ‘Save‘ button at the top of the page to save your changes.
- For example, ‘[text* your-name]‘ adds a text input field for the user’s name. We’ll explore adding form fields in more detail in the next step.
Step 3: Add Form Fields
- Adding form field options is a crucial part of designing the contact form. Form fields are where users will input their information and inquiries.
- Contact Form 7 provides predefined tags for various types of form fields, including text input, email, checkboxes, radio buttons, dropdown menus, and more.
- In the ‘Form‘ field, you can add a form field by conducting corresponding shortcode tags development. For example, ‘[email* your-email]‘ creates a required email input field.
- After customizing each form field according to the requirements. You can specify whether a field is required or not by adding an asterisk (*) after the field type, like ‘[text* your-name]‘.
- You can also add labels and placeholders to guide users.
- Experiment with different field types and configurations to create a contact form that suits your website’s needs. For example, you can add a ‘Subject‘ dropdown menu, a ‘Message‘ text area, and more.
Step 4: Configure Mail Settings
- One of the most critical aspects of your contact form templates is where the form submission should be sent. Don’t worry you won’t need any complex WP mail SMTP configurations here.
- With Contact Form 7, you can directly configure from the ‘Mail‘ tab of your WordPress form editor.
- To access the mail configuration setting, tap on the ‘Mail‘ tab. You’ll see several fields that allow you to configure the email notification and recipient addresses.
- In the ‘To‘ form field, enter the email address where you want to receive the form notification when users submit the contact form.
- Make sure this email address is accurate to ensure you don’t miss any important messages.
- You can also customize other email settings in this tab, including the subject line of email notifications, the message body, and additional headers if needed.
- It’s important to thoroughly test your contact form by submitting a test inquiry to ensure that email notifications are being sent to the correct email address and that the email content appears as expected.
Step 5: Additional Settings
- Contact Form 7 provides additional settings allowing you to fine-tune the behavior and appearance of the contact form. Here are some key additional settings you must explore:
- Messages: Customize the messages displayed to users after they submit the form, such as the confirmation message and error messages.
- Additional Headers: Add any additional email headers that may be required for specific purposes.
- Use CAPTCHA: Prevent spam submissions by enabling CAPTCHA. CAPTCHA requires users to complete a simple test to prove they are human. You can generate and insert a CAPTCHA shortcode in the ‘Form‘ field.
These additional settings can help you maintain the relevance of forms that are submitted by the users and avoid unnecessary spamming.
Step 6: Display Your Contact Form
- Once you’ve created and configured your contact form, it’s time to display it on your WordPress website.
- Contact Form 7 provides a shortcode for each form you create, which makes it easy to add the form to any page, post, or widget area on the entire site.
- To display your contact form, copy the generated shortcode from the ‘Form‘ tab of the form editor.
- Whether you want to add the contact form on page or post; with the WordPress editor, you can simply paste the shortcode into the content area you want the form to appear. Not to mention, a contact form is also one of the crucial things to add in WordPress footer for better productivity.
- After adding the shortcode, save or update the page or post.
- Now, when visitors access that page or post, they will see your contact form and can use it to get in touch with you.
FAQs About How to Setup Contact Form in WordPress
- Go to your WordPress dashboard and navigate to ‘Appearance’ → ‘Widgets’.
- In the list of available widgets, find the ‘Contact Form 7’ widget and drag it to your desired sidebar location.
- In the widget settings, select the contact form you want to display from the dropdown menu.
- Save the widget, and the contact form will now appear in your website's sidebar, allowing visitors to contact you conveniently.
- In the WordPress dashboard, go to 'Contact' and click 'Add New' to create a new contact form.
- Customize each form individually by adding fields and configuring settings.
- To display different contact forms on different pages or posts, use the unique shortcodes generated for each form.
- This flexibility enables you to efficiently manage multiple forms for various purposes on your website, such as contact forms, feedback forms, and more.
- In the form editor, go to the 'Form' tab.
- To add CAPTCHA, click the 'Generate Tag' button next to 'CAPTCHA'. Insert the generated CAPTCHA shortcode into your form.
- Alternatively, to use reCAPTCHA, click the 'Generate Tag' button next to 'reCAPTCHA'. Follow the instructions to configure reCAPTCHA for your form.
- Save the form, and the added CAPTCHA or reCAPTCHA will help filter out automated spam submissions.
Conclusion
Hence, creating a contact form in WordPress is not about conducting a technical task. But making a strategic move to enhance user experience, and build brand trust. It even helps in streamlining the communication between service providers and audience.
With Contact Form 7 affordability, customization, and robust features, you have a powerful tool at your business core. Following the phases outlined in this comprehensive guide step by step will help you to tailor contact forms as per the website and business needs.
If you have any further questions or need assistance, don’t hesitate to contact us. Our experienced WordPress developers will help you maintain the website as a hub of effective communication and engagement for targeted users.
