If you’ve just built your WordPress site and are ready to populate it with essential pages, you might need a good contact form plugin. Even in 2024, many themes don’t come with a solid contact form module out of the box or with basic form functionality.
Often the best option available in this sort of scenario is good ol’ Contact Form 7.
Today, I’m going to review the Contact Form 7 plugin from a developer’s perspective and an average user’s perspective to help you better understand if it’s right for your needs.
Table of Contents
Contact Form 7: Quick Review
Contact Form 7 has over 5 million active installations in the WordPress Plugin Directory and is arguably the most popular contact form plugin for WordPress. It’s also one of the top 4 most popular plugins in the Plugin Directory, second only to Elementor.
Contact Form 7 lets you create and manage multiple contact forms on your WordPress site. It’s a simple, lightweight plugin that works seamlessly with most (read: pretty much all) WordPress themes. You can customize the forms you create as well as the content of the emails. It supports AJAX-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering.
You can create forms using simple markup and the plugin will automatically generate a shortcode for you. You can then add the shortcode anywhere on your site (e.g. in a post, page, or text widget) to display the contact form on the front-end.
Contact Form 7 also lets you configure the messages that appear on the front-end for different scenarios such as Sender’s message was sent successfully or the opposite Sender’s message failed to send, among others.
A Developer’s Perspective
As a developer, I use the Contact Form 7 plugin on my WordPress websites because (a) it’s free, (b) it’s lightweight, and (c) you can set it and forget it. Contact Form 7 is incredibly simple and works seamlessly with most WordPress and WooCommerce themes.
When I’m building a site, it’s one of the essential plugins on my list to install on day one. The best part is that I don’t have to mess with it at all once it’s set up. It just works.
In addition to this, I appreciate that the plugin is constantly being updated so I don’t have to worry about security or privacy concerns. At the time of this writing, the plugin was last updated 2 days ago which is highly reassuring.
Unlike premium contact form plugins for WordPress, Contact Form 7 doesn’t have a drag-and-drop interface. This is something I’ve accepted over the years and have gotten used to creating forms with simple markup. As a developer, taking time to set up a simple contact form with markup isn’t a big deal, especially considering you have to do it once for each site you create. It does have buttons in the form editor that automatically insert the correct type of field when you click them.
In addition to this, there are plenty of free complementary plugins that you can use with Contact Form 7 to get more out of it. For example, I often use the Contact Form 7 Conditional Fields plugin if I need to add conditional rules to my forms. Some other useful plugins include CF7 Google Sheets Connector and Flamingo.
Pros
- Simple, lightweight contact form plugin for WordPress.
- Works with almost every WordPress or WooCommerce theme.
- You can set it and forget it, it just works.
Cons
- It doesn’t have a drag-and-drop form editor.
An Average User’s Perspective
As an average user, I was able to install and activate the Contact Form 7 plugin quite easily. However, that’s when things became less than ideal. Although Contact Form 7 is the most popular, free contact form plugin for WordPress, it doesn’t have a drag-and-drop form builder. This makes it quite difficult to create the form!
When you go to create a new form, the form editor is pre-populated with a basic contact form. Rewording the labels and button text is easy enough but that’s all I feel comfortable doing. The clickable field buttons in the form editor let you add fields to your form but there isn’t a preview option in the back-end. This means I will need to copy-paste the shortcode into a post, page, or text widget and then preview that to see what the form looks like on the front-end. This takes away from the usability.
Pros
- Once you get it set up, you don’t have to interact with it in the back-end too much.
- The form editor is populated with fields for a basic contact form.
- Works with most WordPress themes.
Cons
- No drag-and-drop form builder.
- Need some technical know-how to create more complex forms.
- No preview option in the back-end.
To Sum It Up
Contact Form 7 is a great form plugin for WordPress developers looking for a simple way to add a contact form to their sites. It’s easy enough to set up if you have basic markup knowledge. However, it takes a bit more time than a form plugin with a drag-and-drop form builder would. It works seamlessly with most WordPress and WooCommerce themes so you don’t have to worry about integration issues. In addition to this, you can always add custom code to style the form however you’d like. You can also install complementary plugins for advanced features like conditional rules.
For an average user, however, Contact Form 7 lacks in usability. The clickable field buttons let you add fields to the form but it doesn’t deliver a good user experience. The worst part is that there’s no preview option available to see what the form looks on the front-end as you’re building it. You have to add the shortcode to a page and preview that page to see the form. In my opinion, this is too many additional steps to simply preview the form.
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