When you think of one of the most important elements of any website, it is undoubtably the contact form. Without this, your customers could not send you a message to enquire about the products or services you sell.

We have used WordPress contact forms on numerous websites that we have built. Often, the customer wants them placed in the footer or the side of every page. When they have a brochure website built, some customers sometimes want a Contact Us form on the Contact Us page.

So, what exactly is a WordPress contact form plugin?

A contact form is simply an embedded form on the page, and web designers can design as many fields as possible. For example, you may have a field for contact number, name, and e-mail and a drop-down box to direct the message to the right person within your company.

How to protect your new WordPress website contact form from spam messages

It’s important to note that even if you use the most sophisticated honeypot systems and anti-spam filters, your contact form is not impenetrable. Spam bots, the really good ones, can often still work out ways around the spam filters and then send you messages.

reCAPTCHA

this is one of the oldest but still one of the best methods of trying to minimise the amount of spam messages a business gets. That’s to use reCAPTCHA messages to stop spam. What reCAPTCHA asks the shopper to complete a quick task, such as “click on the pictures of cats”- this is simple for us humans, but some spambots will struggle to complete this simple task.

Honeypot trap.

So, a honeypot trap occurs when a spam bot fills out a hidden contact form. The spam filter knows that it’s a spam message because it is not visible to the shopper.

Contact form 7

This is only one of the most commonly used contact forms on WordPress. It currently has well over 5 million active installations, so this is one of the reasons why our web design company regularly uses Contact Form 7: It’s one of the most popular contact forms, and it has regular updates as well.

There is even a free version of Contact Form 7 for your business to use.

WordPress WP Forms Lite

This is another free or paid-for plugin that’s really good. WordPress web design agencies across the world use it. It’s light, brilliant, and very simple to install.

Forminator

A very good plugin used by many web developers is Forminator. It’s very simple to install. It’s brilliant, and if you want to upgrade to the paid version, it doesn’t cost that much to do at all.

So, which WordPress contact forms does your marketing agency frequently install on your customers’ websites?

Ninja Contact Form (WordPress)

Like most WordPress web developers, we use Ninja Contact Forms. It’s a great contact form that is simple to set up and install.

Gravity Forms

We also highly recommend trying Gravity Forms. It’s simple to set up, and there are many different options for altering the form’s functionality.

We highly recommend WPForms

On the vast majority of brochure websites we build, whether for a used car dealership or, say, a carpet shop, WPForms is excellent because it suits most businesses. It’s very simple to install, has a range of really useful features, and even comes with anti-spam filtering.

Do your research by reading blogs like this.

Read articles like this to learn about the different available contact forms.

Choosing the correct contact form for your business is essential because if you make it too hard for a customer to contact you, you will likely abandon filling in the form altogether. This contributes to a higher bounce rate, meaning not only could you be potentially missing out on sales, Google’s algorithm will pick up on the high bounce rate and low time spent on the site, and Google’s algorithms are likely to rank the website much lower on Google’s organic ranks over time.

So, instead, make sure that your company website offers a good UX. One way to do this is to ensure that the Contact Us forms are super simple.

Customise the form.

Then, it’s time to customise the form. You want to capture as much information from the shopper as you need, yet you don’t want to make the form too time-consuming for the customer; otherwise, the bounce rate is likely to increase.

So, make sure you capture only the information you need with the minimum number of boxes. For example, if you sell cars, just a phone number, e-mail, and the vehicle’s model are all a sales representative will need to make the call and clinch the sale.

Make sure that you set up some protection.

We recently worked on a customer’s website. They had a WordPress website to serve their business, which operated in Newport and Cardiff, which is in South Wales. We worked each month on improving the business’s search engine optimisation, so for those who do not know, the business simply wants to rank higher in Google’s organic results.

Yet the web developer didn’t set up a spam filter on the website, so we found that the customer was getting a spam message every 10 minutes.

This flooded the business’s inbox, so much so that it filled the whole inbox with spam. So, as you can see, unless this is fixed quickly, and we did fix it, the customer could have missed out on sales. Plus, the customer is likely to have received a “failed to send” automated reply, frustrating the customer.

So, do talk to your web designers and say that when they design the website, whether it be using Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, or any content management system, make sure that they set up anti-spam, whether it be honeypot or a different kind of anti-spam such as reCAPTCHA.

Do you own a Cardiff business and require web design services or help improve your company’s search engine optimisation (SEO)?
If so, do call us. We have been building WordPress content management systems for many different Welsh companies for over ten years, so we have experience working on everything from dentists’ websites to construction companies’ websites. Our websites are high-quality, well-designed, and affordable, so call our web designers today.