Most websites need a way for customers, potential clients or regular readers to reach out. You could buy a theme that has a custom contact page built-in, or try to code a contact page yourself, but these options are typically either costly or complicated. You don’t have time for that – which brings us to Contact Form 7.
What is Contact Form 7?
Contact Form 7 is a free WordPress plugin that you can use to create a variety of contact forms for your website. Not only is this plugin free, but the custom shortcode for each contact form you create makes it easy to add your contact forms to any post, page or widget area.
We love this plugin so much that practically every WPExplorer theme supports it, even our top selling premium WordPress theme Total. And other developers agree, as you’ll be hard pressed to find a theme it isn’t compatible with.
Why Choose Contact Form 7?
So now that you know what Contact Form 7 is, your next question may be why this plugin? There are tons of awesome contact form plugins to choose from so what makes Contact Form 7 the right choice?
Well first, it’s free – as in there is no premium version. So compared to other “free” form plugins you won’t see tons of up-sells built into the main dashboard which is really nice. It’s also customizable. There are also easy ways to tweak your forms with available parameters or with a bit of CSS. And as we mentioned, it’s compatible with a very wide range of free and premium themes, so should you decide to change your theme later on your contact forms should remain functional.
With that cleared up, let’s take a look at how you can use Contact Form 7 on your WordPress site.
How to Get Started with Contact Form 7
Installation is easy. Just navigate to Plugins > Add New and use the Search option to find the Contact Form 7 plugin. Install and activate the plugin.
Once active you should see a handy dandy “Contact” menu item in your WordPress dashboard. Click on it to go your main contact form management page.
The plugin authors were nice enough to include some helpful information in the dashboard – feel free to dismiss this notice at any time. By default there will also already be an example “Contact form 1” waiting for you. We recommend deleting this form so you can start from scratch.
Add New to create your first contact form. You’ll see a lot of options when your contact form opens. Don’t be scared – I promise it’s easy.
First you’ll notice a box at the top of the page. This is where you can change the name of your form. We recommend naming the form something that makes sense to its purpose – like where or how you will be using it.
Now, moving on to the available
[…]
This article was written by Kyla and originally published on WPExplorer.