When designing a website, many companies make the mistake of overlooking their contact page, which is among the more valuable pages that should be included in your website. These pages provide visitors with easy access to email accounts, phone numbers, and live chat options that they can use to get in touch with an individual who represents your company or brand. No modern contact page is complete without a contact form, which gives site users a simple way to contact your business through the website itself.
While contact forms can vary significantly depending on what each specific company wants to place within the form, most forms will include empty fields where the user can input their name, phone number, email, subject, and message. Once the user submits this message, it will be sent immediately to the site owner, which allows for a quick response. Contact forms are essential for any business that wants to provide site visitors and loyal customers with numerous methods of contact.
Unlike emails, contact forms will allow you to obtain consistent information. Many customers use contact forms because they are the most convenient method of contact. While the other methods involve picking up a phone and dialing a number or logging into an account to send an email, contact forms can be filled out and submitted on the contact page, which is a quick and seamless process. This article offers a closer look at contact forms and how to create them for your WordPress website.
Key Takeaways:
- Contact forms help provide users with easy access to email accounts, phone numbers, or live chat options to provide an answer to a question or service the brand or business is providing.
- Your contact forms should avoid any grammatical errors, be kept simple and easy to read, and connect to the brand personality.
- Creating your contact form is extremely easy with four steps that we describe in detail below!
Best Practices for Contact Forms
When you’re getting ready to create the contact forms for your website, there are some best practices that you should adhere to during this process. For instance, make sure that grammatical errors are avoided altogether. Because of the lack of text on a contact page, any spelling error within the contact form will make your business seem unprofessional and messy. It’s also important that your contact form is kept simple. The empty fields that you include should request only basic types of information, which can include the customer’s email and message. Visitors won’t want to spend 10-15 minutes filling out a lengthy form when they only have a simple question to ask.
A major problem with some contact forms is that they require mandatory phone numbers and mailing addresses before the form can be submitted. If you want the form to be effective and to look great, there are some simple ideas that you should follow. For one, the backdrop to the contact form should match a specific style that you believe will create a good first impression. The background to your contact form should pair well with your brand personality. Most modern customers want contact forms and pages that are sleek and stylish yet simple at the same time.
How to Create Your Contact Form on WordPress
Contact forms are necessary for every website if you want your customers to be able to ask questions about your services or products. Keep in mind that contact forms aren’t automatically built into WordPress websites, which means that this addition will need to be made by you. Adding a contact form is important because it provides customers with a method to reach you that doesn’t require sending an email or calling you by phone.
There are also several benefits that come with placing a contact form on your website. For instance, these forms offer protection from spam. It’s important to understand that spam bots are able to scrape websites for email address tags, which means that any customer who enters their email address on your site will likely receive numerous spam emails. However, this isn’t the case with contact forms. The inclusion of contact forms almost eliminates the possibility of spam emails being sent to your customers after they contact you.
Another reason to implement contact forms is because these forms allow you to obtain consistent information from all of your customers. When a customer sends an email, they may not include all of the information that you require to properly answer their query. When implementing a contact form, it’s possible to directly tell the customer what kind of information you want.
Yet another benefit of placing contact forms on your website is that these forms allow you to save time when answering customer queries. If you want to effectively save time, make sure that you pair your contact forms with confirmation emails. These emails will automatically be sent to the customer after they submit their message. Within the email should be information on the next steps the customer can take, which could be anything from waiting a certain amount of time for a response to watching a video tutorial that answers their question. Pairing your contact forms with instant confirmations should increase brand loyalty.
Step 1: Choosing the Best Contact Form Plugin
The first aspect of creating a contact form is to choose the best plugin. WordPress plugins are very easy to implement because all you need to do is download the plugin and install it into your WordPress site from the admin dashboard. Keep in mind that some of these plugins are paid plugins that will offer extra features and support.
While there are many contact form plugins to select from, a top option that you can choose is WPForms, which is very friendly to beginners and includes a drag-and-drop builder for the contact form. Make sure that you choose a contact form plugin that you believe offers the types of features that are necessary for your website. We also like Contact Form 7, which can be downloaded and installed from this link. Below is some info on how to get started with the installation process.
Step 2: Installing the Contact Form 7 Plugin in WP
To install the Contact Form 7 plugin, navigate the admin dashboard on your WordPress website. From here, go to “plugins” and select “add new”. A search field will be available on this page, which you should use to type Contact Form 7. Once the right plugin is brought up, all you need to do is click “install now”. The plugin will be installed automatically.
Step 3: Creating Custom Contact Forms in WordPress
Now that the Contact Form 7 plugin has been installed, you can get started on creating custom contact forms that match the design of your brand and website. When you navigate to the Contact Form 7 menu, you can choose to add a new form. You will then be presented with a simple form builder that allows you to drag and drop elements that are needed to create a form. Once you drag fields into the form you’re creating, the form will immediately update to show you what the finished product will look like.
The most important fields to add into your contact form are the email, name, and message fields. Make sure that you consider what types of information you want from your customers when building the contact form. When you’re finished placing all of the elements into the form, you can save the final design.
Step 4: Adding WordPress Contact Form in a Page
The final step involves adding the contact form to the contact us page on your WordPress website. The admin area of your website will allow you to edit an existing page or add a new one. An “add” button will be available that allows you to add a saved form to your website. Once you have finished making the changes, your website will immediately update to reflect these alterations.
Final Thoughts
There are many popular and impressive contact forms out there that you can use for inspiration when creating your form. For instance, the Choice Screening contact form is relatively lengthy but provides customers with the ability to enter precise information about the services they’re interested in and the types of improvements they believe the company can make. The Weifield Group Contracting contact form is also great because of how simplistic it is. All that’s requested of the customer is their name, email, and message. When you’re creating the ideal contact form, it’s important that the final design matches the style of your company.
As touched upon previously, contact forms are highly important for any business or brand because they provide customers with a convenient and simple way to contact you and ask questions about your product or service. Without a contact form in place, these customers may be hesitant to contact you by email or phone. The inclusion of a contact form means that site visitors will be able to contact you without leaving the page that they’re on.
While contact forms aren’t automatically included with WordPress websites, it’s easy to add a form to your website even if you don’t know any coding. The right plugin can make this process easy and will allow you to design a contact form that matches your brand personality and message. The information that you obtain from the contact form will always remain consistent, which should make it simpler for your customer representatives to answer questions and provide customer support.
