In 2024, staying in touch with your audience is very important. Establishing an email list with a service like MailChimp helps you deliver content straight to your subscribers.
Email lists are great, but what if a reader or potential customer wants to get in contact with you directly? That’s where contact forms come in! In this article, we’ll cover how to configure the popular Contact Form 7 plugin for your WordPress site.
How to Install Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 has been around since 2009, and it’s garnered over 5 million downloads in the past decade. Contact Form 7 can be installed directly from the WordPress plugin repository. If you search for “contact form 7”, you’ll be able to find the plugin along with a variety of add-ons.
After the plugin is installed, you’ll see a menu item labeled “Contact” in the sidebar of your WordPress dashboard. This is where all of Contact Form 7’s settings can be configured.
The Pros and Cons of Having a Contact Form
Before we dive into how to configure Contact Form 7 for your WordPress site, let’s quickly go through a few of the pros and cons of adding a contact form to your site.
Pros of Having a Contact Form
- A contact form allows readers, customers, and fans to contact you directly. Depending on the purpose of your WordPress site, the ability for a visitor to communicate with you can be very important. For example, not adding a contact form to an ecommerce site can be financially damaging to your business because interested parties won’t be able to reach out to you if they have questions about your product.
- A contact form adds legitimacy to your WordPress site or business. Many people see the presence of a contact form as a trust factor of sorts. The idea of being able to reach out to you, the site owner, makes your content more trustworthy.
Cons of Having a Contact Form
- Spam can be an issue for public forms like comment boxes and contact forms. Luckily with Contact Form 7, you can filter out spam with reCAPTCHA. You can even configure a Cloudflare page rule to protect yourself even further. We’ll get into the nitty-gritty how to set up spam protection in Contact Form 7 later on in the article.
- After adding a contact form to your site, you’ll likely need to devote time to responding to messages. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing depending on how you look at it. Some people dread the process of responding to emails, while others genuinely enjoy it. From our experience, the relationships that manifest from having a contact form on your site typically outweigh the cost of moderation, so we recommend powering through it!
An Overview of Contact Form 7 Settings
Creating a contact form with the Contact Form 7 plugin is super easy. To get started, click Contact > Contact Forms in your WordPress sidebar. On this page, you can view all of your contact forms along with their associated metadata details.
When Contact Form 7 is first installed, it creates an example form as well. Before we get into how to create a custom contact form, let’s first take a look at the example form to get a better idea of how Contact Form 7 works. Click on Contact Form 1 to view the form settings.