The 5 Best Contact Form Plugins for WordPress in 2021

Help Your Visitors Make Contact

Contact forms are more than just common—they’ve become standard features on most websites. In the past, many websites would simply toss their email address or phone number up on a contact page and call it good. But these days, visitors expect to be able to navigate to that page and send you a message, right then and there. Not only does this create a better user experience for your guests, but it instills a sense of confidence in your website or business.

Why Use a Contact Form Plugin

Of course, there are other ways to communicate with your visitors. One of the big trends these days are chatbots. We’ve all seen them—those little floating bubbles in the bottom right, enticing you to click and start up a conversation with an AI-powered chat machine.

While these are novel and can certainly be useful in some situations, they shouldn’t be your go-to method for communicating with your visitors. People are busy, and it’s just a lot easier to shoot off a quick message rather than attempting to fiddle with chatbot software.

After all, email is still the preferred method of communication in the digital world. No other form is as prevalent and ubiquitous. It only makes sense to give your guests a way to send you or your business a quick email when they need to.

What Makes a Good Contact Form Plugin

As you might well know by now, contact form plugins are plentiful. There are literally hundreds of options out there. Finding the right one can be tricky, but knowing what makes a good one can help you on your quest.

Overall, a good contact form plugin should be easy to use. You should be able to add a form to your website, customize its functionality, and change its appearance without too much effort. It should also be fast—you don’t want a bad plugin bogging down your website performance. With these metrics, we can start to narrow the field considerably.

Beyond the basics, however, the best form plugin is going to depend on what you need from yours. If you’re simply looking for a simple email contact form to add to your site, there are a few really great options. But if you need something more complex, such as a form that’s able to calculate mortgage rates, for example, you need to be a little more selective.

Below, we’ve gathered a list of some of the best WordPress contact form plugins available, gave an overview of their features, and categorized them on what they’re best at. Out of these five plugins, you’ll be hard-pressed to find one that doesn’t suit your needs. Let’s dive in!

The 5 Best Contact Form Plugins for WordPress

The Best All-Around: WPForms Lite

WPForms Lite isn’t the oldest kid on the block, but thanks to its easy-to-use interface and complete set of features, it’s quickly grown in popularity. The developers extol a single purpose for the plugin: Make a WordPress forms plugin that’s both easy and powerful. They’ve done a pretty good job of it.

The plugin features a drag and drop form builder that’s simple and intuitive. And it comes with all the features you’d expect from a solid form plugin, including basic fields, spam protection captcha, email notifications and confirmation pages. The best part is that this is all free with the WPForms Lite on the WordPress plugin repository.

If you choose to upgrade to the premium version of WPForms, however, you gain access to over 150 form templates, conditional logic, file uploads, signature features and more. The free version of WPForms is an incredibly well-rounded plugin that’s easy to use and offers all the features that most will want. If you only need a simple form, and you don’t see yourself needing any advanced features later on down the road, this is the plugin for you.

Features

• Free lite version of the plugin that offers great all-around features
• Drag and drop form builder interface
• Captcha integration
• Email notifications and confirmation pages

The Most Features: Formidable Forms

Formidable Forms is not for the feint at heart. It’s a complex form plugin aimed primarily at developers, so working with it can be complicated. But if you’re a developer looking for an extensible form plugin with the most features and an incredible amount of control over your forms, this plugin is hands-down the best there is.

The plugin provides access to a plethora of powerful add-ons that help you create more than a simple contact form. For example, you can create payment forms, registration forms, profile forms and surveys, just to name a few. And while the plugin is geared towards developers, it comes with a drag-and-drop editor that still makes it fairly user-friendly.

Another set of features that make Formidable Forms incredibly useful for power users is its ability to display and manipulate date on the front end of your WordPress website. These features can be used to create directories, calendars, rating systems and more. And with advanced calculation features, you can create robust order forms and forms with inline calculations. There’s even full WooCommerce integration.

All in all, Formidable Forms is a premium form plugin that offers an endless number of features and customizations for those with the technical knowhow to work with it. If you need advanced forms that are extensible and highly customizable, this is the one you want.

Features

• Drag and drop form interface
• Fully extensible for developers
• WooCommerce integration
• Advanced front end form creation and data manipulation

The Most Impressive: Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms has a longstanding history in the WordPress community. It’s been around for quite some time, and it’s regarded as one of the better WordPress form plugins. It offers a vast array of features while still managing to be relatively user-friendly.

The plugin features a powerful drag-and-drop interface for crafting forms. And the available types of forms you can make are incredible: Survey forms, quizzes, and online ordering are just a few of the available options. The plugin also features conditional logic, so you can guide your visitors through elaborate processes that change depending on their answers.

Given its lengthy list of features and benefits, it may come as no surprise that Gravity Forms is a premium-only plugin. The price doesn’t only get you features, however—the developers invest heavily in their support. If you need amazing forms with great features and even better support, this plugin delivers.

Features

• Intuitive drag and drop form creation
• Conditional logic features for crafting forms that flow
• Over 30 form fields to choose from
• Available add-ons from companies like HubSpot and Zapier
• Excellent priority support from the developers

The Easiest to Use: Ninja Forms

Ninja Forms is a free plugin built and maintained by WP Ninjas. It’s got all the features you’d expect from a solid form plugin, and the default forms look great on most themes since the plugin is designed to inherit the styling of your theme.

Ninja Forms offers 16 templates for you to choose from to customize your form, and the plugin doesn’t restrict the number of forms you can have on your website. For those looking for a simple, easy-to-use solution with basic functionality, Ninja Forms is a winner.

For those looking for something more advanced—fret not! Ninja Forms offers a developer mode that you can enable, giving you advanced settings for crafting the perfect form.

Ninja Forms does offer a premium version with many more features, but the plugin is unique in that you can also purchase specific add-ons rather than paying for the full suite. This allows you to purchase only the features you need rather than paying for the entire plugin. For those looking for a simple plugin that can grow with their site, this is an excellent solution.

Features

• Free version is easy to use
• Plenty of useful template features
• Has its own set of add-ons for custom form functionality
• Modular premium options for paying for only what you need
• Advanced tools for developers

The Most Popular: Contact Form 7

The oldest and most downloaded form plugin is Contact Form 7. And while there are many better alternatives out nowadays, a contact form plugin roundup would be incomplete without mentioning this old timer.

Contact Form 7 isn’t the easiest plugin to use on this list. It can take some fiddling to set up even a basic form. It’s also not going to win any awards as far as features go—there isn’t much going for it beyond setting up basic contact forms.

That said, Contact Form 7 does still have its advantages. For starters, it’s one of the few contact form plugins that’s completely free. It’s also extremely fast. Its minimalistic approach means that it won’t add any extra, unnecessary bloat to your website. If all you need is a basic contact form, and you’re concerned about page load times, this might be the plugin for you—as long as you have the patience to set it up.

Features

• A very basic, tried-and-true contact form plugin
• Minimal approach means fast performance
• Completely free plugin

Conclusion

If you’re at all concerned about being able to interact and communicate with your website visitors, you need a contact form. Even if it’s just a basic form that a user can email you with, it’s a feature that most people have come to expect from all websites. If you find you need something a little more feature-rich, however, choosing the right plugin will depend on your website’s specific needs. Hopefully, this guide has shed some light on the better plugins out there and helped you determine the best one for you.