Contact forms are used a lot on WordPress sites, and for good reason. People know that spammers scrape web pages looking for email addresses to spam. So one of the simplest ways you can decrease the likelihood of getting spam emails is to not show your email address. Contact Form 7 is one of the most popular ways to do that.
The role of a contact form is to let people email you without letting them see your email address. You also get the benefit of making people email you with certain data or other formatting rules. Those are beyond the scope of this Quick Guide, but they’re certainly common practice and worth understanding as a possibility.
In this week’s Quick Guide we use a popular plugin, Contact Form 7, to make a quick contact form. While this is just scratching the surface of what your email forms can look like, it should get you up and running quickly. Watch that video:
Contact Form 7 is way more powerful than just contact forms, but they’re definitely the place to start. Here are the steps in text from:
How to Let People Email You Wit Contact Form 7
- In your WordPress admin area, go to “Plugins > Add New”
- Search for “Contact Form 7”
- “Install” and “Activate” the plugin.
- Go to the “Contact” menu on the left side of your admin area. This should give you the ability to make a contact form. Create, view, and edit your form. Save it.
- After saving, the plugin should show you the form shortcode. It will looks something like
Error: Contact form not found.
- Create a new page. Call it something like “Contact Us”. Add the shortcode to the content area of that new page.
- Try out your form and make sure you recieve the email from it.
That should all work. One possible common issue is that Contact Form 7 will default to using the main email address for the WordPress site. If that is not your email, you’ll want to change it on the form-specific settings.
