While most WordPress templates either have built-in contact forms, or can be easily tweaked to include them using widgets, it’s often better to create your own contact form with a WordPress plugin. A good contact form gives your small business website a professional appearance, and helps you simplify managing your online communication.
The benefits of using a WordPress contact form plugin include:
- Customizations:Â Plugins allow you to create contact forms that match the look and feel of your site, with custom fields, defined next steps, and more.
- Ease of use:Â Many WordPress contact form plugins are simple, user-friendly interfaces that require no coding to install or use.
- Contact management: Some contact form plugins for WordPress include a dashboard to help you manage contact information from your customers.
- Spam protection: Often, contact form plugins for WordPress include some form of security to prevent spam comments.
Here are some of the best contact form plugins for WordPress and your small business website.
Contact Form Plugins for WordPress
Fast Secure Contact Form
This powerful form builder is versatile and easy to use. The Fast Secure Contact Form plugin lets you add, remove, and reorder fields, permits custom field creation, and allows commenters to send emails automatically. You can also create multiple forms and redirect users to any URL you choose after the message is sent.
Fast Secure Contact Form provides automatic spam comment protection with built-in Akismet and CAPTCHA support.
Jetpack Contact Form
If you don’t already have Jetpack installed on your website, you may want to consider using this plugin. It offers many of the features built into WordPress.com websites that aren’t automatically included for self-hosted WordPress sites – stats, social comments, extra widgets, post sliders, email subscription tools, and much more.
One of this plugin’s features is the Jetpack Contact Form, a simple and elegant form creator built on Akismet. You can add a contact form to any page or post, add and reorder fields, customize your email notifications, prevent spam comments, add redirect links, and customize the form appearance, including the text for the submit button.
Custom Contact Forms
This intuitive and highly customizable plugin, Custom Contact Forms, is packed with features and is extremely user-friendly, giving you all of the benefits of CSS customization without having to know CSS. Most features are drag-and-drop or dropdown menu selections, and there are plenty of options to choose from.
Custom Contact Forms let you:
- Customize size, colors, borders, padding, margins, backgrounds, and more for your contact forms.
- Add, remove, and rearrange fields, including custom created fields (text, text area, checkbox, and dropdown)—unlimited numbers of fields are permitted.
- Create an unlimited number of forms and set a different destination email for each one.
- Set required fields and optional fields.
- Display forms in pages, posts, and theme files.
- Redirect to any URL, including a Jquery form thank you message or a custom thank you page.
- Enable CAPTCHA or “Are You Human?†spam comment blocking support.
There are many more features with Custom Contact Forms, including a custom HTML feature for developers to further tweak the design.
Slick Contact Forms
A widget-based plugin, Slick Contact Forms is a user-friendly way to create contact forms that stand out. You can design floating forms, drop-down buttons, or sticky sliding tab forms, located anywhere on the page. This plugin also handles multiple forms per page for additional effect.
While Slick Contact Forms is more limited in terms of personalization, allowing three text input fields and one text area, the plugin offers several configuration options. You can set your send address as your default WordPress admin address, or choose a different email for contact notification. The Send from User Email option shows visitor email addresses in the From field for improved address capture. You can also collect IP addresses and the URL of the page users submitted from.
Slick Contact Forms includes several additional features, such as custom redirects after submission, contact form widget options, shortcodes, and more.
Contact Form 7
Simple, flexible and popular, Contact Form 7 has been downloaded nearly 16 million times by WordPress website users. This contact form plugin lets you customize form fields, appearance, and mail contents. You can create multiple contact forms and insert them on any page or post.
Contact Form 7 supports Ajax-powered submitting, Akismet, and CAPTCHA spam filtering, and is available in multiple languages.
Do you use a contact form plugin for your small business website?
Plugins Photo via Shutterstock
Article source: http://smallbiztrends.com/2014/03/best-contact-form-plugins-for-wordpress.html