Creating Forms with the Contact Form 7 Plugin
November 3. 2019
If you are looking for plugins for lead generating forms, you probably won’t be able to find a much better one than the Contact Form 7 plugin. What makes creating forms with the Contact Form 7 plugin so popular is its simplicity. As one of the most popular WordPress forms plugins, the Contact Form 7 plugin comes with a plethora of customizable options and benefits for all WordPress users. Plus, it’s super easy to install and activate.
The benefits of using this particular plugin
Knowing that the Contact Form 7 plugin is one of the most popular plugins used for this purpose means little to nothing unless you know exactly what makes it so great. Not only will it serve as one of the best marketing tools for your WP website, but it will also allow you to manage multiple forms as well as to completely customize them. Some of the main benefits of this plugin are:
- The freedom when it comes to customization
- Easy installation and setup
- The ability to insert forms into any pages or posts by using Shortcode
- Bonus third-party extensions for additional functionality
With over 5 million active installations and forms that support CAPTCHA and Akismet spam filtering, the Contact Form 7 is a pretender for becoming one of your favorite plugins. And it certainly will become after you hear that it’s completely free, although you will have to pay extra to access some of its additional features! All you have to do now is install the plugin and then spend some time customizing your perfect form. It’s important to note that unless you use it with a theme that comes with all the necessary fields, you will have to write CSS.
Installing the Contact Form 7 plugin
The installation and activation of this plugin are fairly simple. Then again, the same goes for almost all plugins for WordPress websites. That’s the beauty of using WordPress – everything seems to be achievable with only a few clicks. Once you log in to your WordPress Admin Dashboard, find the Plugins section on the left side of the display. Select Add New and type in the name of the plugin you need. In this situation, that’s the Contact Form 7 plugin. Click on Install now and then select the Activate Plugin section you will soon see. That was it for the installation part. Let’s see how you can display a form and then proceed to customize it to your liking.
How to display a form
So far so easy, right? Don’t worry! Things aren’t about to get complicated! Go to Contact > Contact Forms where you will be able to see the central administration panel where you can manage multiple forms. Contact Form 1, or the default form contains all the basic fields a contact form might need, such as the name and e-mail. The default form is already ready for use. All you have to do is paste it into your contact page by copying the code from our example – [contact-form-7 404 "Not Found"].
Are you not ready to follow in the footsteps of many website owners who use the default Contact Form 1? Then spend some time customizing your own contact form.
Creating forms with the Contact Form 7 plugin
We bet that when creating your blog website, you thought all the hard work was behind you. But if you want to stay afloat in this competitive market, you will have to constantly work on your website’s improvement. That’s why you might want to consider creating a brand new form by using a template. Creating forms with the Contact Form 7 plugin start with you giving your new form a name and scrolling to Form. Here you will see a template that is supposed to tackle all the main fields of a contact form. The good news is that this can be done without too much trouble.
To generate the form-tag you want, select the tag-generator button. You’ll be able to add fields such as URL, number, quiz, etc. And if you want to add a label to your field, you can do it by copying the HTML that comes with form tags from the other fields. You can add as many extra fields as you want, but remember that modesty is always the key! Once you are done customizing your page, don’t forget to save your work by clicking on, you guessed it, SAVE.
Switching to the Mail tab…
You might have added extra fields to your form but they won’t be automatically reflected in the template setting for e-mail notifications. Besides the main fields, such as the e-mail, subject, and message, you will probably want to add additional fields. Every time a contact form is sent, you will receive an e-mail notification. In the To field you will be able to insert the e-mail address you want to be on the receiving end. Be careful with this one – you don’t want your mail to end up at the wrong address.
Now scroll down to the Message Body section of the tab. If you want the e-mail to display all the pieces of information you asked for a sender to share, you’ll have to make some changes here. Mostly, you should just add the extra form-tags that you created for your new form. Just copy the name of your field from your template and paste it into the e-mail template in the Message Body section. Click SAVE and you will be done with this part.
Once you save a form, you will be able to see all field names in the Mail tab. If they haven’t been used before, they will be shown as black, and in case they’ve been used before, they will be gray.
So, to recap…
With unique features like forms that support CAPTCHA and easy integration of new fields into a template, the process of creating forms with the Contact Form 7 plugin will not only be simple, but it also might turn out to be fun. Of course, if you decide to use another contact form plugin, you won’t have a shortage of options. However, by being one of the oldest and most used contact form plugins of its sort, the Contact Form 7 plugin will without a doubt turn out to be a great choice! So you might say we are cheering for it!
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