Add A Contact Form To Your Blog Without Using A Plugin!

Plugin-Free

Contact Forms

If you’re not doing elaborate things with your contact form then there is no reason that you should have to muck around with a plugin when a simple embed will do!

All plugins come with downsides, and even though Contact Form 7 is well optimized for speed, like many it can still be guilty of running on (slowing down) pages that are not your contact page.

Sometimes, a simple copy-paste script is all you need!

The Embedded Contact Form Alternatives!

I’ve prior discussed how to do this with Google Drive Forms, but that is a very labor intensive process if you need to use captcha. (Which you do, or bots will spam you mercilessly!)

I started out wanting to use http://www.foxyform.com/ but their embed script was not playing nice at all on WordPress.

Then I tried to use http://cloudcontactforms.com/ as recommended by some other bloggers, but it is somewhat clunky and appears to no longer be in active development.

I’ve used http://www.contactme.com/ successfully before – but I wanted something with less of their branding while still being free.

If I was using it on a site with heavy traffic I might look at http://www.jotform.com/ (but I’m not, at least not yet).

So I finally settled on using: http://kontactr.com/ which is super simple, straight forward, and does one thing well (with minimal app branding).

The only downside to Kontactr (which is also an upside in some cases) is that it uses a script embed rather than an iframe. I’m cool with that – but older versions of WordPress may not be happy with this. (Upgrade your site!)

Using Kontactr To Add An Embedded Contact Form To Your WordPress Site

1) Visit http://kontactr.com/ and set up a free account. Confirm your email address and then log in.

2) Once logged in, you can either copy the “Ajax Widget” as it is or click customize to make changes. I’m using it “as is”.

3) Create a page on your WordPress site named “Contact” or “Contact Us” and add your desired text. Then flip over to the Text/HTML tab and paste in your script after the text.

3) Preview then Publish your page and go view the result.

4) (Be sure the page is published) Fill in the form with some sample data and hit send. To verify that it works. You should then see a confirmation message display:

5) Check your email inbox and in a few moments you should receive the test email:

(Though it shows “no-reply” as the from email address… the email address the person provided is actually the reply-to address. So all you have to do is reply to the message to send them an email.)

6) It works and you’re done!

It’s as simple as that to add a simple contact form to your website or blog without mucking around with plugins.

This is an excellent replacement for a plugin when you do not need an elaborate form with more “stuff”.

If you have more advanced needs, be sure to check out Contact Form 7 and if you need more than that, use Gravity Forms (it rocks!).

Many contact forms are guilty of calling their plugin data (and thus slowing stuff down) on every page of a site… even though we only use them on a single page! By using a script such as this, we ensure that we do not need to do development tweaks to make the contact form plugin behave.

Of course, you will want to check in, every few months, to make sure that it is still working, since free tools like this come and go.

Do you have a contact form on your website? What do you use for it?

via Business 2 Community http://www.business2community.com/blogging/add-contact-form-blog-without-using-plugin-0595548?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=add-contact-form-blog-without-using-plugin