Building Custom Contact Forms in WordPress Themes
Posted on 19th June 2023
Including a contact form on your WordPress site is a great way to give your visitors an easy way to get in touch with you. However, creating a custom contact form can be a bit of a challenge if you’re not a developer.
In this article, we’ll show you how to easily create a custom contact form in your WordPress theme.
First, you’ll need to create a new file in your theme called “contact-form.php”.
Next, you’ll need to add the following code to your contact-form.php file:
<form action="” method=”post”>
This code will create a basic contact form with fields for the visitor’s name, email address, and message.
Next, you’ll need to add a bit of code to your theme’s “functions.php” file to process the form data.
add_action( ‘wp_ajax_nopriv_process_contact_form’, ‘process_contact_form’ );
add_action( ‘wp_ajax_process_contact_form’, ‘process_contact_form’ );
function process_contact_form() {
$name = $_POST[‘name’];
$email = $_POST[’email’];
$message = $_POST[‘message’];
// Do something with the form data here…
}
This code will “hook” into the contact form processing code that is built into WordPress.
Finally, you’ll need to add a bit of CSS to your theme to style the contact form.
#contact-form {
width: 50%;
margin: 0 auto;
}
#contact-form label {
display: block;
margin-bottom: 0.5em;
}
#contact-form input,
#contact-form textarea {
width: 100%;
}
#contact-form input[type=”submit”] {
margin-top: 1em;
}
This CSS will center the contact form on the page and style the form fields and submit button.
And that’s all there is to creating a custom contact form in WordPress!
Building Custom Contact Forms in WordPress Themes
Adding a contact form to your WordPress website is a great way to give your visitors an easy way to get in touch with you. There are a lot of plugins out there that will allow you to create a contact form, but if you want to keep your website lightweight and fast, you might want to consider building a custom contact form.
In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to build a custom contact form in a WordPress theme. We’ll be using the Contact Form 7 plugin to manage the form submissions, but the actual form will be built using HTML and CSS.
The first thing you’ll need to do is install and activate the Contact Form 7 plugin. Once the plugin is activated, you’ll need to create a new contact form. To do this, go to Contact » Add New in your WordPress admin area.
Give your form a name and then start adding fields to it. You can add text fields, email fields, text areas, and more. Once you’re finished adding fields, click the Save button to save your form.
Now that your form is saved, you’ll need to grab the code for it. To do this, go to Contact » Contact Forms and click on the form you just created. On the form editing screen, you’ll see a tab called Form. Click on that tab and then copy the code for your form.
Next, open up your theme’s template file where you want to display the contact form. For this tutorial, we’ll be adding the form to the sidebar. So, we’ll open up the sidebar.php file.
Paste the code for your form into the sidebar.php file and then save the file.
Now, if you go to your website’s home page, you should see the form displayed in the sidebar.
If you want to style the form, you can do that by adding some CSS to your theme’s stylesheet. For example, the following CSS would change the form’s background color and add some padding around the form fields:
form {
background-color: #f5f5f5;
padding: 10px;
}
Now that you know how to build a custom contact form in a WordPress theme, you might want to consider adding one to your website.
The best way to add a custom contact form to your WordPress theme is to use a plugin. There are many contact form plugins available for WordPress, but we recommend using Contact Form 7. It’s a free plugin with lots of features and a simple interface.
Once you’ve installed and activated Contact Form 7, you’ll see a new menu item called “Contact” in your WordPress admin sidebar. Click on it to create your first contact form.
You’ll see a screen where you can enter the code for your contact form. There are a lot of options available, but for our purposes we’ll just stick with the basics. Enter a name for your form in the “Form Name” field and then add a simple message in the “Message Body” field.
Now we need to add some fields to our form. In the “Fields” section, you’ll see a list of all the different fields you can add. For our contact form, we’ll just need to add three fields: Name, Email, and Message.
To add a field, simply click on the field name in the list. A new field will be added to your form. Repeat this process for the Name and Message fields.
Now that we have our fields added, we need to add a submit button to our form. In the “Buttons” section, you’ll see a button labeled “Submit”. Click on it to add it to your form.
Now that our form is complete, we need to add it to our WordPress theme. The easiest way to do this is to use the shortcode provided by Contact Form 7. Simply copy the shortcode and paste it into the page or post where you want your form to appear.
And that’s it! You now have a custom contact form in your WordPress theme.
