There are many ways to let the visitors of your website reach you. You probably have a Facebook or Twitter profile, you might even have your email address published, but when it comes to simplicity and ease of use, nothing beats a simple contact form.
You see, the less friction there is, the more probably your readers will decide to send you a message. Finding you on Facebook or writing email can be too much hassle for them, but if you provide a contact form, it’s extremely easy for your readers to reach you.
In this article, I will show you how to quickly create a simple contact form with two tools, WPForms and Mailgun.
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How to Create a WordPress Contact Form in 3 Simple Steps
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1. Install WPForms
Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t offer a contact form by default, but there are dozens of plugins, and in this article, I will show you how to set up and use one of the most popular called WPForms.
So, I’ll just go to my Dashboard here and select Plugins → Add New from the main menu.
Next, I’ll search for WPForms and here it is – Contact Form by WPForms. So I just click the Install Now and then the Activate button.
Once it’s activated, you’ll see this welcome screen where you can learn what WPForms does, you can even watch a step-by-step video if you want, but I’ll just scroll down and hit the big orange Create Your First Form button at the bottom.
Now, here’s the setup window where I’ll write the form name, let’s call it Contact and I want to create a simple contact form, nothing fancy.
Now, here’s the editing mode of my form where I can see the preview on the right and available options on the left.
As you can see, there are a lot of different options, but what I really want is a simple field for the name, so I’ll choose Simple from the Format drop-down menu.
Email field looks good and in the last field, I’ll change the label to be just Message.
In the Confirmations section of Settings, I’ll make the text bold. That’s it.
Finally, I’ll save the changes and exit the editor.
2. Set up SMTP with Mailgun
Now that I have a form, I need to make sure that it can actually send messages to my email address. For that, I need to configure SMTP.
So I select SMTP from the menu and Install WP Mail SMTP plugin that plays nicely with WPForms.
Next, I can start setting things up.
First, I need to change my From Email to info@todaywp.com and then I need to choose Mailer service.
I choose Mailgun. When you scroll down, you’ll see that you need two things here, Private API Key and Domain Name. Both can be easily obtained from your Mailgun account.
If you don’t have it yet, go to mailgun.com/smtp and click Try It Free button to create one. Just fill out your name, company, email and password. You don’t even have to add your payment info.
Once you hit the Create Account button, and confirm your email address, you need to verify your identity via SMS.
Finally, you see this Dashboard. Click your initials in the top-right corner and select API keys from the menu.
Now copy the Private API key and paste it to your WP Mail SMTP settings.
Next, click the Get a Domain Name link below to navigate to your Mailgun domain.
Click the link with the domain and select SMTP option on the next page.
Now, copy the domain name and paste it to your settings. Finally, hit the orange Save Settings button.
Now it’s time to test the settings. So I’ll just go to Email Test, fill out my email and hit Send Email button. And it’s working!
Perfect.
3. Create a Contact Page
Ok, so now I have my contact form and SMTP ready, but I need to actually publish the form on some page so my visitors can use it.
First, I need to go to the list of forms and copy the shortcode.
Next, I’ll create a new page which I’ll call Contact Us and I simply search for the shortcode widget in the list of blocks.
Finally, I paste the shortcode to the field and preview the page.
And here it is! My beautiful contact form!
Ok, so I’ll go back and hit the Publish button.
Now, when I visit the site, there’s a new menu item at the top which brings me to my contact page.
Here, I can type my name, email address and write some message. And I’ll click the Submit button.
Done. So, there you have it. Simple yet effective contact form with WPForms and Mailgun.
