A contact page is a convenient, dedicated page on your website that provides various ways for your visitors to more easily contact you. More importantly however, it also allows business to reach out to you to get in touch for joint venture promotions.
When creating your website, make sure to add a contact page with a form. The ideal URL structure for this page is example.com/contact. Put a link to this page in your main menu if you want to be easily contacted or only in the footer if you want to discourage emails.
Last, you must secure your WordPress contact form, otherwise you’ll be bombarded with irrelevant spam messages on a daily basis. You’ll still get spam regardless, but it will make communication much more manageable if you secure it with captcha software.
What to include on your contact page
A good contact page should welcome visitors to the website, tell them what to expect when contacting you as well as provide alternative ways to get in touch via a phone number or social media profile of choice.
In general, a contact page should have the following:
- An easy to use form your visitors can fill out to send a message.
- The form should have “need to know” fields only like name, message and email.
- Consider providing an email address and phone number if it makes sense for your website.
- Include a Google map and a physical address or mailing address if you’re running a ecommerce website.
- Make an FAQ page and direct visitors there before they send you a message.
- Set expectations of who should email you.
- Include any social media profiles visitors can interact with you on.
- Provide a drop down of services inquiries to help specify the purpose of a message.
What does a contact form look like?
A contact form is an HTML form that allows a user to input their name, email, subject and message in any easy to use form on your website without having to log into their email client like Gmail.
It allows people to send emails to you quickly and easily via a contact form. The benefit for you as online business owner is that messages can be tagged via what form the message was sent.
Contact forms can vary in appearance and function. There is one perfect design ad the design of your form. Instead, your focus should be to craft a contact page to make for the best possible user experience. This will depend on the function of your website.
At a minimum I would provide a simple form, some context about how you want to be contacted and any related social media profiles.
How to create a contact form with WordPress
To create a contact form with WordPress is easily done so by use of a plugin. With WordPress, you have a lot of great contact form plugins to choose from. Everything from Contact form 7, to Ninja Forms and Forminator.
My personal choice is to use WP Forms Lite as my go-to contact form plugin for simple contact forms. It’s a feature rich plugin that has a lot of advanced features and forms perfect for different use cases like surveys, payments, online registration and so forth.
Step 1: Install WP Forms Lite
Your first step will be to install WP Forms Lite on your WordPress installation:
Once installed you’ll be directed to a welcome message, here you can click on the large orange button that says “create your first form.” You’ll now be in the WP Forms dashboard where you can setup a simple contact form:
You should see an option that says “simple contact form.” It’s this form you want to use if you’re looking to get a professional, easy to use form setup.
Once you click this button, you’ll then be able to edit your simple contact form.
In the left hand sidebar you’ll notice a “field” tab. Here is where at the click of a button you can add in additional fields. However, as this is a contact form, we suggest keeping things simple.
Step 2: Setup Your Form To Receive Emails
Navigate to your settings and then notifications tab. Here is where you can set what email address receives all messages sent through the form. By default it will be set to your WordPress admin email.
By default, it is set to the admin email which is the email you used when installing your WordPress installation. If you want to change it to something else you can do so here.
Step 3: Add the form to your contact page
Last, it’s time to add in your contact form on your contact page. This can be done in a variety of ways but I suggest using the shortcode option as it gives you the most control over where exactly your form appears.
Once you’re done editing your form make sure to first click on the save button and then click on the embed button in the top menu in WP Forms.
You’ll see the short code for your form. All you need to do is copy and paste this short code into your WordPress editor on the contact page.
The form will automatically appear. Congrats! You’ve successfully added a professional looking contact form to your contact page. Now it’s time to secure it to prevent spam.
Secure Your Form With hCaptcha
This set is technically optional as you now have a functioning contact form on your contact page, but you will start getting daily emails from mostly spam bots. To prevent this is easy, all you need to do is setup HCaptcha, here’s how:
Create an hCaptcha account
First, you’ll need an hCaptcha account, second you’ll need to input specific keys within WP Forms to make it secure. You can find where to input these keys under the settings tab for WPForms in your WordPress dashboard.
Specifically you’ll need a “site key” and a “secret key” which you get from your hCaptcha account:
Get your site key
To get these keys go ahead and create an account at hCaptcha.com. Visit the website, click the “sign up” and then click on “add hCaptcha to your service (free).”
Once you’re logged in, simply click on “new website” and you’ll be presented with a few different fields to fill out your websites information:
When adding your website the only aspect you need to fill out is the “general information.” You need to complete this form in order to your get your site key.
Once you complete this form and add your domain you’ll be given your site key:
Getting your private key
You’ll next need to get your private key. To do this is quite simple, navigate to the settings tab which is found under your profile icon. The secret key will found here to verify user captcha codes:
Input both your site key and secret key into WP Forms CAPTCHA settings
Now go ahead and add both keys in your WP Forms CAPTCHA settings and click on save. You’ll need to do one more step.
Enable hCaptcha for your specific WP Form contact form
Last, you have to enable hCaptcha on your form itself. Navigate back to the form editor. Under the fields tab click on hCaptcha to enable it on your form.
You’ve now secured your contact form with hCaptcha. Double check the form to make sure the hCaptcha box appears and you’re all set.
Visitors will now have to fill out a simple challenge in order to email you. Depending on the difficulty setting you set, people may simply have to click an “I am human” box or they may also be required to click select pictures.
Benefits of Adding a Contact Form To Your Contact Page
There are numerous benefits to having a properly configured contact form. Let’s review some of the positives right now.
1 – Improved Spam Protection
Spam comes in the form of bot programs than can sort through thousands of websites in a few minutes and then find the various contact forms or email address with ease. Building a list of forms for spammers to send messages to.
Spam is not something you’re ever going to get rid of and it does become more of a problem the larger your website grows. But you can minimize it using a properly configured form with reCAPTCHA.
2 – Get Better Emails
As I mentioned in the beginning, I’ve made thousands of dollars through my contact form. It’s an odd thing to say, but if I did not have a contact page with a contact form I’m simply making it more difficult for business to reach out to me.
As your online presence grows, companies will start to want to work with you because of the reach you’re able to have.
Conclusion
You have numerous options for creating a contact form for your contact page. All the contact form plugins work much the same way in general. You install them, set up the form and then copy and paste the shortcode into your contact page and the short code will display the form.
Make sure that whatever contact form plugin you decide to go with that you setup some sort of spam protection with it. We prefer hCaptcha because it can be added to singular form instead of reCAPTCHA which is applied site wide.
