Contact Form 7 is one of the most popular and oldest WordPress contact form plugins around. However, despite its popularity, many people struggle with how to set up Contact Form 7.
How to install Contact Form 7
The first step to setting up Contact Form 7 is to install the plugin on your WordPress website. To do so, in your WordPress dashboard, select Plugins > Add Plugin from the menu.
Then type Contact Form 7 into the search function. Once the Contact Form 7 plugin is displayed, click Install > Activate.
How to set up Contact Form 7
Click on Contact > Contact Forms. Here you will see the central administration panel where you can manage multiple contact forms. You will also find the Contact Form 7’s default contact form, labeled Contact Form 1.
Creating a new contact form
Give your new contact form a name, and then scroll down to Form. Here you can edit the new contact form template.
Your template defines the various fields that will appear on your form, as well as the labels that appear next to those fields.
By default, Contact Form 7 adds a number of fields to new forms, including name, email, subject, message and send. More than likely, you will want to keep all of these fields.
However, you may want to add extra fields, depending on your site’s needs. To do this, you can select the appropriate tag-generator button to generate the correct form-tag. For example, to add a URL field, you just click on the URL button
Setting up mail to control email notifications
Any extra fields you add to your contact form are not automatically reflected in the email notification template settings. Therefore, once you have finished customizing the Form, switch to the Mail, tab.
This is the template for the email you will receive when a contact form is sent. In the Tofield, check that the email address is correct, as this is where any contact form correspondence will be sent. (Contact Form 7 by default will add the email that is linked to your website).
Scroll down to the Message Body section and add the extra form-tags that you generated for your form. This will ensure that when you receive an email via your contact form, it will display all the information you asked the sender to share.
To add a field to your email template, just copy over the form field from your template. You can also add regular text around your fields. You can see how we did this in the screenshot below:
Insert a contact form into a page or post
You now know how to set up Contact Form 7, create a contact form, and adjust the mail settings. The last step in the process is to now insert the contact form into a page or post on your WordPress website.
Select Contact > Contact Forms. Then copy the shortcode next to the form that you want to add to your site.
