WordPress Contact Form Without Plugin
WordPress plugins are extremely helpful for those who are just getting started. The endless supply of Plugins to choose from is really one of the greatest features of choosing WordPress as a CMS (content management system) for your website. However, as you may or may not know, not all WordPress plugins are safe. Some shady plugins have been known to cause malware or cause harm on your site. Luckily, the WordPress community tries it’s hardest to compact against such problems, but nevertheless it’s important to try to use only the best-rated WordPress plugins possible for your website.
There is, however, another reason why you should avoid stuffing your site with plugins, and that’s speed. The more bloated, slow-loading extra weight you add to your website, the slower it’ll load. Slow-loading websites not only hurt your use-experience, but they actually hurt your chances of ranking content in Google. While not the hugest of all ranking factors, speed is taken into account when ranking content. As noted at Moz, Google has indicated that website speed (and as a result, page speed) is one of the signals used by its algorithm to rank pages. Research has shown that Google might be specifically measuring time to the first byte as when it considers page speed.
Less is More
My recommendation would be to always try to run as lean as possible when it comes to adding WordPress plugins to your site. Less is more and while you may think you’re doing a pretty good job at keeping things to a bare minimum, I’m here to show you how to drop one more plugin…The contact form plugin.
Contact Form 7 has over five million installs! That’s amazing, but how many of those sites do you think simply set up a simple contact form for their Contact Us page and never do anything with plugin or page again? Most people list their email and phone number above the contact form anyways, so does installing a contact form plugin on your site really need to be added? Isn’t there an easier solution?
There is, by using Google Forms.
As you can see from my Contact Page, you can create a simple contact form using Google Drive and have all your contact inquiries sent to a spreadsheet. Setting up a contact form is easy. Simply embed the form on your contact page and you’re done. I added a little extra CSS for rounded corners on my contact form, but the out of the box copy and paste version will work for you just fine.
What Are the Benefits?
One of the benefits of choosing Google Forms opposed to using a WordPress Plugin is you’ll never miss an email. Anyone who ever fills out your Google Form will have their information sent to a Google Drive spreadsheet. From there you can sort replies into a sub-section to easily stay organized.
The following video will walk you through adding a Google Form onto your website.
