The contact form is a simple thing and often overlooked both in adding one and styling it. This post will address that with a number of options for creating a contact form that can be added to a WordPress blog site.

1. The Free plugin

There are a number of plugins available, but one of the favourites is the Contact Form 7 plugin. I’ve personally not used it, but it looks simple enough: install it, create your form, create a page and just drop it into the page. It’s got an extensive community built around it, including being supported by Crowd Favourite’s WordPress Help Center. Simple but effective is probably the best way of describing it.

2. The paid plugin

GravityForms is mind boggolingly comprehensive and really is a brilliant plugin, if a little pricey at $39 for the basic version. However, it’s very impressive and I’d thoroughly recommend it to anyone wanting to create something a little more than a contact form – with options to upload files, you could do a lot more than a contact form with it:

3. The Wufoo option

Just like I like GravityForms, I’m also a big fan of Wufoo. It’s a really easy to use form builder that’s free to use although there are paid versions available for heavy users. Much like GravityForms, you can really easily edit fields through a neat interface. Integrating it into WordPress is easy enough — click ‘Code’, then ‘Embed Form Code’ and copy and paste the JS code into a page or post (in HTML view) and hit update. You should then have a form! Probably the best option for those who just want a simple form that won’t get used a ton.

4. The custom form option

Not for everyone, but the final option is to use a custom form. The obvious advantage here is that you have total control over both styling and content and if the form is how customers are going to get in contact with you then it can really be worth spending a bit of time making a contact form that stands out. For the form itself, you’d do best to grab one off CodeCanyon (ThemeForest’s sister site). The one I went for is one with a bit of AJAX built in for extra nice-ness. At $4, it’s not expensive either. You’ll then have to create a custom page template and include all the relevant files (and importantly CSS). Custom page templates are created with the following syntax at the top of a page:

<?php
/*
Template Name: Contact
*/
?>

You might find multiple headers are useful here – to do so the WordPress way, save your new header as header-contact.php and instead of <?php get_header(); ?> use <?php get_header('contact'); ?>. You’ll then be done with an awesome form that’ll attract visitors from around the globe with it’s awesomeness!

I hope this post has been of some help if you need some guidance choosing which type of form to go with – enjoy!