How to Use Ninja Forms to Create a Contact Form

Contact forms are one of the most common needs on a WordPress site. Whether you want them because giving people an email address scares you of spam or just because you like to get a more structured amount of data from your correspondents, there are a whole host of possible solutions for dealing with contact forms. One of the greatest of those is the Ninja Forms WordPress plugin—best part, it’s free! Today, we’ll cover how to make a “Ninja contact form.” Hi-ya!

Like many other contact form plugins for WordPress, Ninja Forms uses “shortcodes” to make the form appear on the post or page you’ve set it up to. You’ll see all that and more in the video below explaining how to make a WordPress contact form with Ninja Forms. The plugin has made it easy to make a basic contact form, with a starter form included out-of-the-box. So, here’s how to use the included form, and the Ninja Forms shortcode, to get your first contact form working:

6 Quick Steps to Make a WordPress Contact Form with Ninja Forms

  1. To get started, we’ll install Ninja Forms. WordPress makes this easy, we’ll just go to “Plugins > Add New” in the left sidebar of your WordPress admin. Then you’ll search for “Ninja Forms” and click “Install” and “Activate” on the first result.
  2. To support an average use case for WordPress, Ninja Forms comes with a form by default, called “Contact Me.” You can find the starter “Ninja contact form” by navigating to “Ninja Forms > Dashboard” in your left sidebar of the WordPress dashboard. This is your home for Ninja Forms, and all your forms are shown here.
  3. If you need to customize this “Contact Me” Ninja Form (not shown in the video), you can do it here by clicking on the form name. That’ll launch you into the Ninja Forms builder experience, which is relatively intuitive (and too ambitious a scope for this particular Quick Guide).
  4. To add the contact form to a WordPress page, you’ll need what’s called a shortcode. A Ninja Form shortcode for the initial form is likely to be, precisely, [ninja_form id=1]. You can copy-and-paste it from the Ninja Forms Dashboard.
  5. On your WordPress Contact page editor, you’ll paste into the post editing area (that thing you usually use to write content), the Ninja Form shortcode from #4. If you prefer not to copy-and-paste, there’s also an easy ability to insert it from the “Add Form” button that Ninja Forms adds beside the “Add Media” button that WordPress comes with by default.
  6. When the form is submitted, Ninja Forms will both save the contact form submission on the WordPress site, and send an email to the WordPress site administrator. If you need to change that setting, you’ll do it in the Ninja Forms interface we mentioned in #3.

And that is how to add add a WordPress form anywhere with Ninja Forms. 🙂


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Vladimir Djurovic
July 27, 2018 6:14 am

I use Ninja forms on all my sites, and I love them. A lot of options and easy to use.

One thing I found most frustrating about contact forms has to do with sending notifications when someone fills your contact form.
This is actually the problem of WordPress in general, and sending emails using default mailing function. Most of the times this just doesn’t work.
That’s why I always use some SMTP plugin in conjunction with contact form plugin. It makes life much easier.