Everything You Need To Know About WordPress Forms

You want people to get in touch with you. To ask about your products, find out about your services, or even just tell how great your website is. You've set up a nice WordPress website, and now you want your visitors to talk to you.

You could point them to your social media, but that's an extra step that takes them away from your website, and most won't bother. You could put in your email address, but aside from that being, yet again, a step that'll take them away from your website, you're opening yourself up to a whole new world of spam.

So what do you do?

You get a form.

What is a form?

Any time a website asks you to type something in and sends that data to a server, that's a form. Whether it's "Sign up to our newsletter", "Enter in your credit card details" or "Decline all cookies", you're dealing with a form. If you're typing, toggling, uploading or selecting — you're using one.

Because forms transfer data, they require a bit more programming than your average plain HTML page. But the functionality they unlock far outweighs the pain of setting them up.

Does WordPress have contact forms built in?

Unfortunately not. You won't find one hiding in the blocks or patterns or settings. The closest thing in a basic WordPress install is the Comments Form — great for public comments on posts, but terrible if you want to keep your visitors' comments private.

You could build your own form or hire a developer, but it'll take time, money and plenty of code to make it integrate with WordPress, send the emails to your account, and then when you inevitably need something changed, you're going through the process all over again.

Thankfully, there are plenty of plugins to help you. Here are some we've tried.

WordPress Form Plugins

Forminator

A popular, well-rounded plugin that handles not just contact forms but also orders, payments, quizzes, bookings and more. It has several templates to make it easy to add a form to your site, and also integrates with third-party apps like Slack and Mailchimp. You can also connect to Stripe or PayPal to make payments even easier.

Forminator Pro unlocks even more features, including autofilling addresses, setting up subscriptions through Stripe, PDF generation, and using e-signature fields. It starts at around £11/month for a single site.

WPForms

Built for ease of use, WPForms has plenty of templates to use, as well as integration with Stripe and Square to make collecting payments easy. The free tier is a bit limited when it comes to integrations and form field options, but it still covers most basic needs. Features include spam blocking and even an AI-assisted form builder.

WPForms Pro (from around £75/year) unlocks more integrations (Mailchimp, Slack, HubSpot), more fields and extra tools to build more powerful forms.

Contact Form 7

Simple, free and focused. Contact Form 7 does exactly what it's meant to do — create contact forms for your site. No templates, no integrations, and you do need to know what you want your form to include before you can add it to your site. But if all you need is a basic contact form and nothing more, then Contact Form 7 is ideal.

Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms is one of the more popular WordPress form plugins out there, with plenty of features. Used by many larger businesses, it has an easy-to-use drag-and-drop builder, an extensive API perfect for developers, and it integrates with plenty of third-party apps such as Campaign Monitor, Mailchimp and HubSpot.

There's no free version, but the Basic version starts at around £45 and gives you access to a wide range of integrations and features.

What else do I need to set up?

Configuring WordPress for your SMTP server

SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. This is how emails go from your server to your email account. Instead of using SMTP, WordPress, by default, uses PHP's mail() function, which doesn't require any setup...but that's part of the problem. Because it's so easy to abuse, many hosts block it or route mail straight to spam.

Luckily, there's a plugin to help you with this. WP Mail SMTP will make WordPress use SMTP instead of PHP, meaning your emails go to their intended recipient. If you're on one of our cPanel hosting packages, you can set WP Mail SMTP to use your cPanel mail account.

Or if you're using one of our Managed WordPress packages, you can use a dedicated email service, such as SendGrid, Brevo, or Zoho.

Stopping spammers from exploiting your form

Unprotected forms can become a doorway for bots and hackers. If they're not sending you malicious links in their spammy emails, they're using the form for a brute-force attack or a denial-of-service attack.

But there are ways to stop them. You can use a security plugin, which will help protect your site in general, and many of the form plugins will include an anti-spam setting, often using reCAPTCHA.

You need an email address

It seems obvious, but make sure your form sends to an address that actually gets checked. If it's going into a general inbox, you might want to think about adding a filter so it doesn't get lost in the noise. And if you're away, is someone else checking it for you?

You also need to look at how you've set up the emails your form will send. What's the subject line? Is it something you'll remember, or will you be spending your time going "I don't know what this is — to the spam folder with you!" Can you actually make sense of what the form sends you, and if not, are there changes you want to make?

These are small details, but they do build up over time. It's better to get them sorted early on rather than try and fix them weeks or even months into your form use.

A well-built form should make life easier for you and your visitors. Once it's set up properly, it should keep rolling along smoothly for years to come. Just keep your plugins up to date, check your email regularly, and you're good to go.