Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin – Forms Make Easy

Contact forms are a vital part to your website. Let’s face it, if you want people to be able to contact you, you need to install a contact plugin on your WordPress site. There are a lot of of contact form plugins for WordPress. Some of them are 100% free while others cost you money. In this article I am going to be talking about Contact Form 7, a 100% free WordPress plugin that you can install and configure on your site in under 5 minutes.

Features of Contact Form 7:

• Multi language support.
• Ajax powered.
• CAPTCHA
• Spam filter (works with Akismet)
• Shorcodes
• Build your own custom forms.

 

Thanks to Paal Joachim Romdahl at easywebdesigntutorials.com for this video.

At first it can be kind of overwhelming trying to learn exactly how Contact Form 7 works.  I am not the greatest with code, but even I could catch on.  However, once you learn how to use it you will find it to be a great plugin.  If you haven’t watched the video I have included in this article above I would highly recommend that you watch it.  It is over 20 minutes long but should really help you in building your first form.  Before I get started on showing you exactly how Contact Form 7 works you might want to go ahead and check out their docs  or view their FAQ’s  if you have any questions that are not covered in this article. They do actively participate with their users on their support forum  if you do discover any bugs or problems.

Install the plugin and activate it.

Once you have done that you’re going to see the plugin right under “Comments” inside your WordPress dashboard. Click on “Contact Forms”. This is a pre made one that the developers have already created for you.  Click “edit to view the premade one.  I like to use this so I have something to work off of. If you want you can click on “Add New” to start your own form from scratch.

Here are the elements of a pre made one:

Shortcode:

You can see there is a shortcode for it at the top of the form. For my example we are using this shortcode [contact-form-7 id=”10″ title=”Contact form 1″] which you can place anywhere on your site by putting that shortcode anywhere you want on different pages/post on your website. It’s a good idea to make a “contact us” page and place it there. But, I do like how you can use that shortcode to place it anywhere you want on your site.

Next, is the form field. This is what it looks like:

As you can see we have a name, email, subject, and message field. Then there is a submit button. It’s a pretty basic form.

There is a generate tag which you can add in:

• Text field.
• Email.
• URL.
• Telephone number.
• Number (spin box).
• Number (slider).
• Date.
• Text area.
• Drop-down menu.
• Checkboxes.
• Radio buttons.
• Acceptance.
• Quiz.
• CAPTCHA.
• File upload.
• Submit button.

You can adjust the setting of each one.  For an example here is the text field one:

Next is the mail field. This is what it looks like:

There is a To: field, From: field, Subject: field, Additional header: field, and File attachments field. Optionally, you can click “use HTML content type”.

Next, is the message body field.  You can cut and paste shortcode fields into this area to get your form to work correctly.

Next, there is a messages field. This is where you can enter in custom text for success pages, errors, etc.

Make sure you take the time to custom these messages to fit your site.

Additionally, you can use “additional settings”. This is where you can add your own Javascript. For example if you want a custom thank you page you can put this code in:

on_sent_ok: “location.replace(‘https://yourdomain.com/thank-you/’);”

There you have it a very nice easy, lightweight, free WordPress plugin. It’s pretty easy to customize to your liking. It has been updated frequently so you can trust that the developers are actually going to answer your questions.  Contact Form 7 is a highly recommended contact form plugin.  Lot’s of other sites have already used it on their sites.  However, if you are using your email through your web hosting and are having problem with email I would recommend you read my post on changing your MX records. I would like to hear you experiences with this plugin if you have any. Please leave your comments down below.