There are many different ways to add a form to your WordPress website – this post covers some of the most popular options, from basic contact WordPress forms to fully featured customisable plugins.
The features, support and pricing models of WordPress forms plugins vary significantly, so it’s important to evaluate the options based on your requirements. The best plugin for your business may be entirely different to someone else’s.
In their simplest form, WordPress forms are ideal for allowing people to get in touch without sharing your email address on your website. At the other end of the scale you could use a form to do complex calculations on the fly, integrate with your CRM or take purchase information.
Below are five of the most popular forms plugins available today…
Jetpack WordPress Contact Form
- Cost: Free
- Installs: 1 million+
WordPress include a free contact form as part of JetPack. If you only need a basic contact form, and already have JetPack installed, this could be a good form plugin for you. Form entries are spam filtered and you get an email notification of each new submission.
Customisation options are limited, but you can make some changes to the names of the fields and add extra fields such as radio buttons, checkboxes and dropdowns.
Contact Form 7
- Cost: Free
- Installs: 4.4 million
Contact Form 7 is the most popular free WordPress form, with enough features for simple forms, including different types of response field, and email responses. It also includes anti-spam features such as CAPTCHA and Akismet spam filtering.
As a free plugin, Contact Form 7 is run on donations and support is limited to the generosity of other users on the WordPress support forums.
Ninja Forms
- Price: Free to $499
- Installs: 300,000+ (free version)
One of the most fully-featured WordPress forms plugins, Ninja Forms has a basic free option, which makes it easy to test and see if it works for your requirements. If you like it, you can easily upgrade or buy add-ons such as conditional logic and third-party integrations.
Although the free Ninja Form plugin only has basic functionality, a benefit over other free plugins like Contact Form 7 is that email support is included, even for free users.
Formidable Forms
- Price: Free to $117
- Installs: 100,000+ (free version)
Formidable Forms has a similar range of functionality to Ninja Forms, and a similar pricing structure, with a basic free version and the ability to upgrade. One benefit of Formidable Forms is that they have a useful library of form demos available to download, including forms for job listings, star ratings, bug reports and an events calendar.
Gravity Forms
- Price: $39 to $199 per year
- Installs: 123,000+
Gravity Forms is our first choice forms plugin, and the one we use on our WordPress websites. The reason for this is that it has more functionality and importantly, flexibility, than the rest, so it can be fully customised to suit the needs of our clients.
It’s also very intuitive to use straight out of the box, with a user-friendly form builder and a huge variety of features, from conditional logic to third-party app integrations.
Unlike the other options there is no free version but in our opinion the end result is a higher quality plugin. Look out for our forthcoming detailed blog post on Gravity Forms’ features.
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