Time for another WordPress Wednesday! Weekly tips for new and established self-hosted WordPress users, designed to help you get the most out of your site from Sarah, a WordPress website developer.
How to Add a Contact Form to A Wordpress Site
It’s a great idea to give people a way to contact you via your website, especially if you’re looking to work with brands or other bloggers on collaborations and projects. However, just having a link to your email address can leave you susceptible to spam emails which, let’s face it, nobody enjoys.
One way to get around that is to add a contact form to your site instead. That way you can avoid the spam emails and you can also customise the form so that you’re receiving the information that’s useful to you straight from the beginning – everyone wins :)
There are tons of plugins out there that will allow you to add forms to your site, but if you’re just after a basic form without the need for too many fancy options you’ll probably find that the integrated contact form that comes with the Jetpack plugin will do you just fine. (If you’re looking for something that can do more then we recommend Contact Form 7).
Installing the Jetpack Plugin
If you don’t already have Jetpack installed then go to Plugins in the sidebar and click Add New.
If you’re running the latest version of WordPress you should see this screen and Jetpack will usually be one of the top four plugins, but if not just use the search bar to find it.
Next, click on the install now button. One you’ve done that WordPress will start to install the plugin – then you just need to click on the blue Activate Plugin button.
Once you’ve done that you just need to connect your Jetpack plugin to your WordPress.com account and you’ll be good to go! :) (Click on Jetpack in the sidebar and it’ll give you a giant green button asking you to connect, it’s hard to miss :) )
Inserting a Contact Form
Once you’ve got Jetpack installed, the next time you navigate to a page or a post you should see a button at the top that says Add Contact Form.
Click on that and a window will pop up:
You can add and remove fields to suit your needs. There are quite a few different field options – for example, radio buttons are useful if you want to ask what kind of enquiry it is, or you could add a checkbox asking if people want to subscribe to your mailing list.
You can also specify which email address the form goes to, and the subject line of that email, by clicking on the Email notifications tab at the top:
By default WordPress will send the form to the email address of the user who created the page. If you want it to go to a different address you can specify it here.
Once you’ve clicked the blue Add this form to my post button, you’ll see something like this in the content editor:
Click preview and you should see your contact form, ready to go! :)
If you want to make any changes to it just click on the Add Contact Form button again and make them, Jetpack assumes that you want to change the existing form and not add a new one.
There’s one other feature that we love about the Jetpack comment form: it saves a copy of every enquiry within your WordPress dashboard! If you’re ever concerned that you’re not receiving your emails just click on the Feedback button on the sidebar – every enquiry sent through the form will be listed there :) Handy, right?
