How to Add a Contact Form to a WordPress Blog
It’s generally not a good idea to post your email address “as is” on your website. Spammers use programs called “bots” to scour the web and collect email addresses, to which they then send massive amounts of spam email.
Instead, create a separate “Contact Me” page and add a contact form where your visitors can easily send email directly to you, without exposing your email address. Of course, some spammers have bots that fill out these forms, but that’s much more rare and isn’t as big of a concern.
Here’s how:
- Install the contact form plugin. Download Contact Coldform and unzip the file. Upload the unzipped folder to your plugins directory (usually at /wp-content/plugins). In WordPress, go to the “Plugins” tab and click “activate” next to the entry for “Contact Coldform”.
- Create a new page called “Contact Me”. At the top of the WordPress administration dashboard, select “Manage” and then “Pages”. Click “Create a new page”, type “Contact Me” in the “Title” space, and add some text asking your readers to send you email using the form.
- Add the Contact Form to your page. At the place where you want the form to appear, add this code: <!–coldform–>(if you’re using the WordPress visual editor, make sure to click the “Code” tab before entering the Coldform code).
- Configure Coldform. Go to the “Options” tab and select “Coldform”. Fill out the form and click the “Update” button at the bottom. Other than your name and email address, you can easily use the defaults for most options.
- That’s it. The new page should appear in the site’s menu automatically, and when you visit that page, the contact form will appear. If you’re comfortable with CSS, you can add some form-specific style information to your stylesheet, but the form default form is pretty good. Or use a Coldform skin from the website — cut and paste the code into the style.css entry in WordPress (go to “Presentation” and select “Theme Editor”; scroll to the bottom and paste in the code for your skin; hit “Save Changes” and you’re done.
thanks for that great tip! Easy to implement, too!
You’re welcome, Lisa. That’s one of the reasons I like WordPress — almost everything you can think of doing with it (within the blogging realm, anyway) is fairly simple to accomplish.
This isn’t working. it shows up as transferred to the plug in folder via ftp, but it is not showing my on admin account plug in page.. I’m using Safari.
Pam: I’d suggest you contact the developer for support. I have no idea what could be causing this problem.
How do I upload the folder to my plugins directory (usually at /wp-content/plugins)? i usually just search for plugins in the wp admin center and then click install. thanks for your help!
Mark: This was written before WP had automated plugin installation. Then (and you can still do this with later versions) you used FTP to install plugins. Most hosting services offer FTP accounts (and if they don’t, chances are you weren’t able to install WordPress anyway); once you’re logged in, you just drill down to the proper directory justlike you were in Windows Explorer.
I want to add a small form in my side bar. Is this a possibility? How would I dictate the size of the form?
Zak: I don’t see why not — I’m sure I’ve seen that on other sites. However, CFII has been updated several times since I wrote this piece — I would look through their FAQs and installation instructions, rather than count on advice from someone who hasn’t had to mess with it for 2 years. You should be able to simply add the CFII code snippet into a text widget, or into your sidebar template, but there may be issues with that that I don’t know about.
Hi, the code is not working for me i have followed all the steps but my page on site is still blank. Please guide me through it.
Hi, it worked now 🙂 i left the spaces between the code previously. Please tell me how can i add general forms to pages. I shall be very thankful.
Any sort of code that I tried to add into my sidebar messes the whole side bar up. Also, I can’t use widgets because they throw off all of the customization I’ve done on the side bar. I’m having the same issue with rotating images on the sidebar . . .
Zak (and others): As much as I might like to, I really can’t provide support for Coldform. I’m not the developer, and even as a user, it’s been nearly 2 years since I’ve even looked at it. I set it up, write this post, and it’s pretty much taken care of itself since then. What’s more, significant upgrades of both Coldform and WordPress have taken place in the meantime. I strongly suggest you contact the developer of the plugin for support.