SimpleForm has been specifically designed to ease the work of who must add, edit and manage a contact form in own WordPress site. This step-by-step guide will help you to have your form ready in a few minutes. Let’s go!
After you’re done installing and activating SimpleForm plugin on your WordPress site, you can see the Contacts tab is added to your admin dashboard menu. To create your contact form, go to Contacts → Edit Form page. This page allow you to easily change the way your contact form looks like.
Firstly, edit the name for the form as desired, then move to the Form Description section. You can add an introduction text above the form for providing overall instructions for filling in the contact form correctly and other relevant and useful information for users. For example, you can indicate how required fields are marked, the response time or where to find additional help. By default, the text above the contact form reads “Please fill out the form below and we will get back to you as soon as possible. Mandatory fields are marked with (*).” You can change this to whatever text you’d like to display. A short text to provide additional information can also be added below the form. By default, this is an empty text.
Just done it, you can start to build your contact form. Scroll down the page and move to the Form Fields section. SimpleForm offers 7 field types: name field, lastname field, email address field, phone field, subject field, message field and a checkbox field for obtaining user consent. For each of these fields, you can choose to make the field visible to all users, choose what kind of user (registered or anonymous) can see it, or choose not to use it at all in your contact form.
We have made available for you multiple options to have full control over the form fields. You can hide the label that appear outside of the field input or customize the label text. You can add a placeholder text into the field input so that users can see what type of information should be entered into that field. You can set a minimum and maximum number of characters that can be manually entered into the text boxes. Notice that this option is only available for name field, lastname field, subject field and message field, and that zero (0) means no limit (the message field has a lower limit set to 5 characters by default). Lastly, you can make the field required, in that case, users will not be able to submit the contact form unless they provide a value or response to that specific field.
SimpleForm includes by default two honeypot fields, an invisible spam protection to trick spambots into revealing themselves. It also allows you to enable an optional math captcha field which requires human interaction. This field is an additional security solution introduced to protect your site from spam. By default the Captcha Field is not displayed. If you want to use it, select the way you want to display it and change its label as much as you like.
Your contact form building is nearly complete. You just scroll down the page and move to the Form Appearance section where you can determine the layout. You can select the label placement. Labels can be top aligned above a field or left aligned to the left of a field. You can choose how required fields are marked. By default an asterisk character is added next to the label text. Instead of using an asterisk, you can use a word to mark required fields.
You have also ability to align two fields side by side (2 columns layout). If you have chosen to use the name and lastname fields, you can place the lastname field next to name field on the same line. If you have chosen to use the email and phone fields, you can place the phone field next to email field on the same line. Let’s see some examples below.
Once chosen and customized the fields to suit your needs, just click the ‘Save changes’ button at the bottom. Now, you’re able to add the contact form to your site. Scroll up the page and back to the top. You can use our pre-built page or any other page on your site. Go to Pages in the admin dashboard menu, open the pre-built page entitled Contact Us or, if you don’t want to use it, create a new page or choose an existing one. Ensure that the shortcode has been entered into the page content, then publish or update the page. Once done, if you didn’t make typos your contact form should appear on that page!