Wait! Wondering why we are suggesting you stop using Contact form 7? Interested to know the reason behind not going with this plugin? Take a look at why you should say no to Contact Form 7 and choose the best quality alternatives.

Why Stop Using Contact Form 7 Plugin?

Yes! Better choose other plugins & Stop Using Contact Form 7 plugin on your WordPress site. While other form builders are optimized for speed, Contact Form 7 uses heavy scripts & impacts overall website speed.

These scripts slow down the website loading & add more CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. When the plugin is active, all scripts get injected to every page on the website.

Even more, Contact Form 7 also doesn’t allow you to make contact forms with captcha & do any custom edits in simple contact forms.

So, If Contact Form 7 has one positive side, it also has a major downside regarding site speed & functionality. And, site speed is the most important factor to achieve high google rankings and conversions. Even 1 sec extra delay in the site loading can change the whole algorithm. 

Thus, the types of WordPress plugins you are using for contact forms, malware removal, SEO, or web designs, must be aligned with the page speed requirements.

So, what to do now? Don’t worry! We have come up with an alternate solution for you. Here are the best 7 alternative plugins to create contact forms that perform better than Contact Form 7.

1. WPForms

WPForms has done a great job in creating WordPress form builders that are easy and lightweight. If you need WordPress speed optimization, the WPForms plugin ensures fast filling & submissions of the forms. 

After coming into the market, the plugin has become highly valuable for non-developers & solved the issue of investing in developers to create WordPress contact forms. The plugin comes with drag & drop functionality so as to create custom contact forms without even writing a single line of code.

WPForms is not only limited to beautiful contact forms but also allows you to create payment forms and other types of forms for your site within a few minutes. With its easy-to-use features, pre-built templates, and workflows, it is the most beginner-friendly contact form plugin out there.

Several other contact form plugins lose mobile responsiveness. However, contact forms designed by WPForms are 100% mobile responsive & fit best to different sizes of mobile devices.

Most importantly, WPForm’s contact forms are speed optimizer that doesn’t harm your SEO and conversions.

2. Ninja Forms

Ninja Forms is another best of its kind. It is the free form creation plugin for WordPress users. It is a drag & drop WordPress form creator to build forms within minutes. As a beginner, you can quickly & easily design complex forms without having any experience of coding.

But if you are a developer, you can best utilize built-in hooks, filters, and custom field templates to make forms according to your needs at any step in the form building or submission.

3. Form Maker by WD

Do you want to create responsive and customizable forms? Form Maker is there to assist you. This form creator is a user-friendly WordPress plugin you can get free of cost. With an easy-to-use drag & drop interface & multifaceted features, this form builder is one of the modern & instinctive plugins designed for WordPress users.

Although Form Maker offers varieties of top-quality features, it is the best choice for both beginners and advanced WordPress users. It only takes a few clicks to construct complex HTML forms. 

No matter whether you have programming skills or not, Form Maker offers an exceptional and clean visual form editor toolbox to create a contact form.

4. Formidable Forms

Formidable Forms is a flexible WordPress plugin to easily create simple contact forms, polls and surveys, and lead generation forms.

With the use of formidable forms, you are all set to create highly customizable forms or kick start your creativity by using pre-built templates. Even more, the built-in visual styler will help you instantly provide custom look & feel to your forms.

Whether your need is the smallest sidebar opt-in form to large job application forms, Formidable Forms is built to do it all. You don’t require any coding knowledge to create professional contact forms for your WordPress site.

Additionally, you can also change the form layout by simply using layout classes. In case of more advanced customizations, you have complete access to edit the form HTML and CSS.

5. Visual Form Builder

Need to manage all kinds of forms under one roof? Visual Form Builder is a WordPress form builder plugin to help you. It will allow you to create wide range of forms as customizable & quick as possible.

It reduces the stress of writing codes & there is no need to write PHP, CSS, or HTML anymore.

6. HappyForms

happy Forms is the newest form builder in the market. It is completely free and provides the simplest way to manage conversations with your customers via creating compelling WordPress contact forms. You’ll be set up and going in 5 minutes or less.

To make it easier for beginners, it uses a drag and drop form builder. It is optimized to increase conversations with your website leads and to help you keep track of conversations in a filterable archive. You can set up your contact forms within 5 minutes.

7. JetFormBuilder

JetFormBuilder is a free form creator WordPress plugin alternative to Contact Form 7. 

It offers 18+ field blocks, 11 posts submit actions, conditional logic, calculated content, and more functional features.

With its Gutenberg WordPress editor, you are now able to create advanced forms and add any content you want to your next form. JetFormBuilder allows WordPress forms to accept all kinds of payments. Moreover, you can style your form sections with the use of free JetStyleManager as you wish.

The post Say No to Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin! (Best Alternatives to Use) appeared first on W3 SpeedUp.

Email lists are a great way to keep your readers or users updated. But what if a reader or a potential customer wants to contact you directly? This is where a contact form can be of immense help.

In this article, we’ll help you configure the Contact Form 7 plugin for your WordPress site.
Let’s get into it!

How to Install Contact Form 7?

Contact Form 7 was launched in 2009 and it currently has over 5 million active installations.

Contact Form 7 can be installed directly from the WordPress plugin repository. You can search for “contact form 7” and install it on your WordPress Dashboard.

Once the plugin is installed, you’ll see a menu item labeled “Contact” in the sidebar of your WordPress dashboard. You can configure all the Contact Form 7’s settings from here.

Contact Form 7 Settings – An Overview

You can easily create a contact form with the Contact Form 7 plugin. Simply click Contact > Contact Forms in your WordPress sidebar. On the page that follows, you can see all of your contact forms along with their associated metadata details.

When you install Contact Form 7 for the first time, it creates a sample form as well. Let’s take a look at the sample form to better understand how Contact Form 7 works. Click on Contact Form 1 to view the form settings.

The “Edit Contact Form” page is split into four sections.

• • Form: You can customize your HTML contact form template using field options like “text”, “email”, “checkboxes”, and more. You can also enter custom HTML in the form customization box.

• • Mail: Customize the email template and settings used for notification emails.

• • Messages: Customize messages that are displayed after specific actions. For example, you can display a unique message after someone submits a contact form.

• Additional Settings: Specify snippets to enable additional features like subscribers-only mode, demo mode, and mail skipping.

How to Create a Contact Form in WordPress?

To create a new contact form, go to “Contact” in the left menu on your WordPress dashboard and click on Add New next to “Contact Forms”. Name the new contact form, and click “Save”.

In the “Form” section, add the HTML required for your contact form. Use the preset buttons to generate shortcodes for popular form tags. To make things easier, you can read the descriptions given below for the preset form tags that come with Contact Form 7.

• • Text: Creates a form tag for a single line of text. Text fields are useful for first names, last names, and other text-based categories that don’t need multiple lines.

• • Email: Creates a form tag for an email address.

• • URL: Creates a form tag for a URL.

• • Tel: Creates a form tag for a telephone number.

• • Number: Creates a form tag for a number. The “number” fields only allow numeric digits.

• • Date: Creates a form tag for a date.

• • Text Area: Creates a form tag for a text area. Unlike the normal “text” input field, a “text area” field allows for multiple lines of text.

• • Drop-down Menu: Creates a form tag for a drop-down menu.

• • Checkboxes: Creates a form tag for checkboxes.

• • Radio Buttons: Creates a form tag for radio buttons.

• • Acceptance Creates a form tag for an acceptance checkbox.

• • Quiz: Creates a form tag for a question-answer pair.

• • File: Creates a form tag for a file upload field.

• Submit: Creates a form tag for a submit button.

You can use the aforementioned preset form tags to make a custom contact form as per your needs. It’s quite easy and you can watch this video to learn exactly how to set up your own contact form.

Structuring a Contact Form with Form tags

Now that we understand all the form tags, let’s create the contact form. Place all the form tags you want to use in all the relevant sections. With the form tags in place, you can use the [contact-form-7] shortcode to embed the form into a WordPress post or page.

Paste the shortcode into an empty block in the WordPress editor.

Are you using the WordPress Classic Editor? If yes, then you can paste the shortcode anywhere in the content editor.

Now, you should see the contact form on the page where you added the Contact Form 7 shortcode. Contact Form 7 automatically converts the form tags into valid HTML that renders with the default CSS styles included with your WordPress theme.

Form tags like “text”, “email”, and “URL” support placeholders. On the other hand, other elements like “checkboxes” and “radio buttons” do not support placeholder.
The checkbox and radio buttons won’t be very useful for visitors without proper labels because they won’t have any context.

Adding Form tag labels in Contact Form 7

There are two ways to add labels to Contact Form 7 form tags. For the form tags below, you can simply wrap the form tag with a placeholder tag.

• • Text:

• • Email:

• • URL:

• • Tel:

• • Number:

• • Date:

• • Text Area:

• • Drop-down Menu:

• • Checkboxes:

• • Radio Buttons:

• • Acceptance

• • Quiz:

• File:

Check out the example “text” form tag below.

[text* text-711 id:cf7-your-name class:cf7-your-name placeholder “Your Name”]

To add a label to this form tag, we can replace the form tag with the snippet below. You’’ see the additional instance of “Your Name” right after the opening <label> </code>tag.</label>

<label> Your Name
[text* text-711 id:cf7-your-name class:cf7-your-name placeholder “Your Name”]</label>

Form tags that render multiple form controls like checkboxes, radio buttons, and dropdown menus, cannot be wrapped inside a </label> tag because it results in an error. For checkboxes, radio buttons, and dropdown menus, you have to add a use_label_element parameter within the shortcode. Follow the example below:

[checkbox* checkbox-948 id:cf7-checkbox class:cf7-checkbox use_label_element “Option 1” “Option 2” “Option 3”]

Configure Mail Settings in Contact Form 7

Now, let’s take a look at the email delivery settings in Contact Form 7. It is most likely that the default mail delivery settings will work just fine for most sites. But, it’s still important to understand the various settings in case if you require a special configuration.

Go to the contact form editor and select the “Mail” tab to access the mail delivery settings.
With Contact Form 7’s mail delivery settings, you can customize the templates and parameters that are used to generate and send a notification to you after someone makes a form submission. It’s possible that you won’t be notified of form submissions if you use incorrect settings. So, it’s important to test the form delivery after creating a contact form and changing settings.

You can configure the following mail delivery settings with Contact Form 7:

• • To: This is the email address where notifications will be sent.

• • From: This the email address to send a notification from.

• • Subject: The subject of the notification email.

• • Additional Headers: Specify additional email headers like “reply-to”.

• • Message Body: This is the body of the notification email.

• File Attachments: You can specify any attachments to include with the notification email.

Contact Form 7 Submission Messages

With Contact Form 7, you can customize a variety of form submission messages. These messages are displayed when a certain condition is met. So, if a visitor forgets to fill in a required field, Contact Form 7 will display a “The field is required” message.

The default messages should work just fine for most use cases. However, you can also customize the messages by clicking on the “Messages” tab in the contact form editor.

Use reCAPTCHA to secure your Contact Form

reCAPTCHA is a technology developed by Google for identifying automated bot behavior. Older versions of reCAPTCHA (V2) required users to pass a puzzle or challenge.

The latest version of reCAPTCHA (V3) does not require any interaction from users. It transparently monitors user activity in the background to distinguish between human and bot visitors. Contact Form 7 supports reCAPTCHA V3 and so, we recommend using the latest version because it provides a better user experience for visitors.

To set up reCAPTCHA, you’ll need to generate an API key first. To generate an API key, log in to your Google account and go to the reCAPTCHA setup page.

Go through the registration form to create your reCAPTCHA:

• • Label: Specify a label of your choosing.

• • reCAPTCHA Type: Contact Form 7 supports reCAPTCHA v3, so select that version.

• • Domains: If your site uses a root domain, add the non-www and www version of your domain. If your site uses a subdomain, just add the subdomain.

• Owners: The email address associated with your Google account will be added as an owner by default. Feel free to add additional email addresses if required.

Click “Submit” after you’ve filled in all the options. You’ll then be given your site-specific “site key” and “secret key”. Leep these keys somewhere safe because you’ll need to add them to Contact Form 7.

Now, click on “Contact” in your WordPress dashboard sidebar, and click “Integration”. Select the reCAPTCHA option, and paste your site key and secret key into the specified fields. Lastly, click “Save Changes” to finalize the reCAPTCHA integration.

Once you’ve configured reCAPTCHA in Contact Form 7, you’ll see a reCAPTCHA logo in the lower right corner of your contact form page. This implies that reCAPTCHA is active and protecting your contact form from spam submissions.

Final Words

Contact Form 7 is the most popular contact form plugin on WordPress. It can be used to create all kinds of form. You can create everything from basic contact forms, to question-answer quizzes, to complex forms supporting file attachments and dropdown menus.

Best of all, it has built-in reCAPTCHA support to help secure your contact form against spammers.

Got any questions? Let us know in the comments below and we’ll get back to you. Or, you can also write to us for more comprehensive queries or questions!

The post Contact Form 7 for WordPress – All you need to know about the best Contact Form WordPress plugin appeared first on W3 SpeedUp.