3 Great Contact Form Plugins for WordPress

WordPress is currently the most popular CMS (Content Management System) around the web. With 29% of the web using WordPress for websites, blogs, or even apps, you can surely understand why it’s backed by a huge community. Since it’s an open source software, most of the security issues are fixed really quick and due to it’s powerful features, WordPress makes it really simple for the webmaster to go from one version to the other, newer one, making the migration process as easy as pie. If you haven’t yet used WordPress, you should give it a try, you’ll love it.

A great community behind a really cool open source software also means you can extend WordPress in a lot of ways. You can build real estate websites, auto dealership sites or even business directories with it. So, for most of the sites you would build you would probably end up with trying to get the user to contact you or call you. If for the second option, things are clear, for generating the contact, booking or appointment page you would need to be able to create (design & develop) a contact form. This is where you would use plugins to extend WPs functionality.

Short list of suggested contact form plugins

So in order to make this easy for you, we’ve compiled a list of 3 great contact form plugins for WordPress. We’ve taken in account the popularity and download rate of the plugin, the ease to create the form once the plugin has been installed and the different other ways to extend the form plugin as well (in case you would like to store the user submitted information in the data base or use conditional fields, for example).

* As a side note, if you’re looking into customizing WordPress quite a lot and you don’t think any of these contact forms plugins will help, you can always ask the help of the specialist. Using an affordable software development company for handling such tasks can be the better option for many projects. Even though WordPress has a great community, sometimes writing and maintaining a lot of code is just better off in the hands of the experts.

1. Contact Form 7: with 1+ million downloads and a really close to 5 star rating (based on 1,478 ratings at the time of writing this article), this plugin will give you a simple and flexibile way of creating contact forms using input shortcodes. If you’re into HTML & CSS, you can customize the look & feel a lot. Also, if you want to tackle extending the plugin with more functionality, you have available other plugins like: Conditional Fields for Contact Form 7,   Database Addon – CFDB7, PayPal & Stripe Add-on or Contact Form 7 Multi-Step Forms.
2. Ninja Forms: just like in the case of Contact form 7, this plugins also has +1 million downloads and a really close to 5 star rating, but based just on 858 ratings. Ninja Forms is a really easy to use form builder, you can learn what most of the fields do in matter of minutes. You can extend this plugin too, with Popup, Permission editor or reCaptcha components. Though, I must mention this, Contact Form 7 has a lot more power when it comes to extending its functionality compared to Ninja Forms.
3. Contact Form by WPForms: with over 800,000 active installations, this lightweight drag&drop form builder plugin will allow you to easily create contact, subscription or payment forms. If you want more from it, you also have available the WPForms Pro version. You don’t have that many free options to extend the functionality of this plugin, but as I’ve mentioned in the previous sentence, you can acquire the professional release and enjoy additional features.

And since I’ve already mentioned “premium version”, if you want to obtain a lot more functionality from a form plugin, then you may also want to have a look over Gravity Forms (starting at $59). It’s really extensible & secure, works with Paypal, Stripe, Mailchimp, Zapier or Trello and can even connect to some CRMs from the market (Agile CRM, Capsule CRM or Zoho CRM). This plugin is not included in the initial 3 plugins-list because the free version isn’t that flexible. Yes, the paid version does a lot of things, but it may be over the budget for some small businesses.

Suggestions on processing form data

In the end, a piece of advice: if you’re going to create forms, you should really be careful on how you’re going to use them. First, make sure you use a SMTP plugin (securely deliver emails to you or your recipients) and second, make sure you know exactly what happens with your data, aside getting it in your mailbox. If you’ve configured the plugin to store the data somewhere on the server or cloud, make sure you’ve read about General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

In order to conclude, I would like to mention that I’d be happy to hear your thoughts on the topic. If you have used one of the plugins above, which one was it? And if you used some other plugin, please use the comment form below to tell us why.