In this article, we’ll walk you through the process of installing and configuring the plugin Contact Form 7, as well as creating a form using it.
Let’s get started.
Step 1. Install and activate Contact Form 7
To install the plugin, you can search for it straight in your WordPress Dashboard. Click on Add New (1) in your Plugins menu, then type Contact form 7 (2)into the search bar. Press Install Now (3) next to the plugin, and then activate.
Once it’s activated, you can find the plugin’s settings in the new Contact area of your WordPress dashboard.
Step 2. Add a contact form to your WordPress page
As you might already see the plugin automatically created a basic contact form (1) for you.
That form won’t be functional at the beginning. To use it on your site, just take the shortcode (2) that you can see in the image above and copy-paste it into any post or page on your site.
The most common placement of such a form would be on your contact page. Here’s an example of what it can look like:
As soon as you publish the page, your visitors will be able to use the form to contact you directly. Every message sent via the form will be delivered to the email address associated with the primary administrator user account on your site.
This is how the Contact Page looks with the Contact form:
Step 3. Create a new contact form
Contact Form 7 also allows you to customize that standard form or create completely new forms with custom fields.
To begin, go to the Add New (1) menu and enter the name (2) of your new form.
The plugin will automatically create a couple of basic form fields such as name, email, subject, and message.
In most cases, you’ll probably want to keep these fields and maybe add a few more depending on your needs. We’ll show you how to add a telephone number field, for example.
To add a new field, pick from the tags available at the top of the form editor panel. To add a telephone number field, click on the tel tag:
A popup will appear immediately. Then you need to fill it out, select Required Field (1), and just click on the Insert Tag (2)button.
Step 4. Configure mail delivery settings
The most important Contact Form 7 settings you need to define are located in the Mail tab. This is an important step because if the emails are not properly configured then you won’t be notified when someone fills out the form.
Let’s review every conditional field.
To: All submitted forms will be sent to the email address specified here. You can use any valid existing email address you want.
From: The server will be using this email address to send you the contact form emails. It should be a valid existing email address.
If your domain is using for example Zoho, GoogleApps, or any other third-party mail service, you will also need to switch from the WP mail() function to the SMTP sending method by additionally installing and configuring one of the SMTP plugins (refer to this article for more details).
Subject: In this field, you can specify the subject of the contact form email. If not filled out, the subject submitted by the visitor is used.
Additional headers: Here you can specify any additional email headers which will be added to the contact form email. For example, the Reply-To field added by default allows you to respond to the visitor’s email address by pressing the Reply button.
File attachments: You can enable attachments for your contact form so that the visitor can send you files in the submitted email.
You can find more information about the contact form usage in the Contact Form 7 official documentation. There you will find details related to enabling reCAPTCHA, using placeholders, attachments, autoresponders, and many more.
That’s it. If you filled everything correctly then you should have Contact Form 7 up and running.
If you get stuck with anything discussed on this page, please get in touch with WPX Support Team via live chat (use the bottom right-hand widget) and they will respond and help within 30 seconds or less.