If you are currently creating a website or blog with WordPress that you will use for business, of course you will need a contact form or will create several forms with different purposes, then you can use Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7 is one of the most popular WordPress form maker plugins and has been installed on millions of WordPress sites worldwide. In this article I will discuss in full about Contact Form 7, I will discuss how to install, Contact Form 7 features, how to configure and much more. However, before you read the core discussion of this article you should first read the explanation below.
Why Do You Need to Contact Form?
WordPress already comes with a powerful system for publishing content and for interacting with your users, WordPress also has a comment column feature. However, WordPress is not offered by default for contact forms built-in. But you don’t need to worry because this problem has been solved by the plugin.
The Contact Form makes it easy for users or visitors to your site to communicate with you as a site owner privately. We all know that email is the easiest form of communication on the internet. Adding a Contact Form to your website not only makes it easier for your users to communicate with you, but it can also create business opportunities and new job opportunities from other parties.
Having a contact page on your website is important and you should not ignore it, and having a contact page will be very incomplete if there is no contact form.
By using WordPress you will easily find several Contact Form plugins available for WordPress. There are paid contact form plugins and also lots of free ones. And Contact Form 7 is a free plugin to create the most popular contact forms that you can find for WordPress. This is truly the most downloaded form plugin.
And let’s continue to discuss the features and how to use the Contact Form 7 plugin.
Read: 6 of the Best Free Contact Form Plugins for WordPress
Create Contact Form with Contact Form 7
To create a contact form with the Contact Form 7 plugin, please first download and install Contact Form 7. After that please activate the plugin. Contact Form 7 is built with standard WordPress practices and integrates well and beautifully into your WordPress admin area. Contact form has also brought a demo form that you can see and use for experiments so you can create a more complete form according to your wants and needs.
Now please click on the new menu called “Contact“In your WordPress sidebar menu. In the form creation area, Contact form 7 has an interface that looks similar to the text editor in the WordPress editor. It has a simple button on the top menu that you can use to add form elements.
After you have finished creating your form, just click on the “Save” button and your form is ready for you to use. Contact Form 7 will give you a shortcode that you can use to place it anywhere on your WordPress site.
Contact Form 7 is a powerful plugin. Each form created with Contact Form 7 can have different settings that can be configured from Mail, Messages, and the Advanced Settings tab.
Mail Settings in Contact Form 7
On the tab menu “The mail“, You can specify email addresses to send messages sent through the Contact Form. By default, Contact Form 7 will send a message to the admin’s email address (the email you use when installing WordPress). You can change to your other email address as you wish very easily.
On the ‘tabMessages‘You can change the standard message that Contact Form 7 will display for you and your visitors. The purpose of the message here is an error message that will appear if there are validation errors, input errors, successes and failure messages when sending forms.
On the “Additional Settings“You can send certain codes in a predetermined format, you can see an example here.
Create more complex forms with Contact Form 7
Creating more complex forms with Contact Form 7 is also very possible for you to do but it is not easy enough because to create more complex forms you are required to understand HTML code. And to make it you can use the buttons on the form editor to enter input types and form elements.
However, because this is a free form-making plugin so don’t expect you to find advanced features such as conditional logic like those in paid form-making plugins like WPForms and its add-ons.
When you click on an element it will bring up a popup where you can choose the basic options for the fields or fields that you want to enter. For example you want to enter options by bringing up the dropdown options, you can select the drop-down menu, add placeholder text, and configure them based on the type of input you want to add a case below, and when it’s finished click “Insert Tag”.
In the text editor section you still need to write HTML such as providing text descriptions and tags moving lines or spaces so that the form is displayed correctly on your WordPress site.
The point in making forms with Contact Form 7 is your knowledge of HTML code, if you master HTML well then you can make Contact Form as a form maker plugin that is very good and more than enough for plugins that you can use for free.
In the Contact form of this blog, I just added a security question named “Quiz”, you can see it in the “Contact” menu here.
Read: Make Payment Confirmation with Contact Form7
Styling Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 automatically uses the style or appearance of the WordPress theme you are using. Most standard WordPress themes come with CSS codes defined for form fields and buttons.
Even on some modern free themes and premium WordPress themes come with predefined styles especially for Contact Form 7. However, if you want to make the Contact Form look your own, you can also add your own custom CSS code to Contact form 7 .
Contact Form 7 adds CSS classes and IDs for all forms. You can use and replace standard Classes in WordPress through your Theme or child theme.
Read: How to Change the Submit Button Design Contact Form7
And that’s a complete explanation of Contact Form 7 that you can learn, you can use Contact form 7 to add form features to your WordPress site for free. This is a plugin that in my opinion is sufficient for creating standard forms, but if you want to have a form with full functionality you can try using other paid plugins. Hopefully this article is useful and good luck. 🙂
