How to Add a Contact Form in WordPress

Install and activate the plugin, build a form with name, email and message fields, set the inbox it sends to, then add its block or shortcode to your Contact page and publish. You are done when a private window shows the fields and a submit button.

1. Plugins › Add New, search the plugin, Install Now, then Activate. A new menu item appears on the left.
2. Contact Form 7: Contact › Add New. Keep the default tags; on the Mail tab set To to the receiving inbox and From to an address on your own domain. Save and copy the shortcode.
3. WPForms Lite or Fluent Forms: Add New, choose the simple contact template, keep name, email and message, and save.
4. Edit the Contact page, insert the plugin's block and pick the form, or add a Shortcode block and paste the shortcode (see how WordPress shortcodes work).
5. Publish, then open the page logged out to confirm the fields appear, not the shortcode text.

A minimal Contact Form 7 form, with a phone field that suits Indian enquiries, looks like this in the Form tab:

<label> Your name [text* your-name] </label>
<label> Your email [email* your-email] </label>
<label> Mobile number [tel your-phone] </label>
<label> Your message [textarea* your-message] </label>
[submit "Send enquiry"]

In the Mail tab, add Reply-To: [your-name] <[your-email]> under Additional headers so pressing Reply answers the visitor rather than your own mailbox.

Turn on the plugin's honeypot first, and add Cloudflare Turnstile, hCaptcha or reCAPTCHA only if junk still gets through. A visible puzzle makes some real visitors give up, so use the lightest check that works.

A honeypot is a hidden field people never fill but bots do. Akismet can score form messages too, though it is built mainly for comments; comment spam is a separate queue covered in stopping WordPress comment spam. Because Contact Form 7 keeps no copy, a message lost to a mail failure is gone; Flamingo or Fluent Forms keeps one in the dashboard.

A working form shows its fields on the public page, delivers a test message to the receiving inbox, logs "sent" in the SMTP plugin and blocks an obvious junk test.

• Shortcode prints as text: it sits in a paragraph, not a Shortcode block.
• Wrong form appears: reselect the saved form in the block and update.
• Submit spins forever: a caching or security plugin may block the form's AJAX request; exclude the Contact page from page cache.