It’s still surprising that Contact Form 7 has so many installations, but it is the third most installed plugin on the WordPress Plugin Directory. It is rather “technical”, since you have to build your forms using shortcodes. Only integrating it into a page also works with a block nowadays.

What do the plugins do?

The Contact Form 7 plugin is a form plugin, so it’s used to provide a form on a website that sends an email. It usually sends an email to the owner of the website, but it can also send a second mail, that is usually used to send a copy to the person that filled out the form. Mails are sent using the wp_mail() function, so it needs a web server that is configured correctly.

To prevent form spam, you can use Contact Form 7 with Akismet, Turnstile from Cloudflare and reCAPTCHA. If you want a more privacy-friendly alternative and one that is not using an external service, you can add “honeypot fields” to your form. The plugin I use here is now called CF7 Apps (previously it was called Contact Form 7 Honeypot). It does offer more that just honeypot fields, but this is what I mainly use it for. You can add multiple honeypot fields, and in many cases, this is enough to prevent most form spam.

Another thing that Contact Form 7 does not do by default is storing the mails it sends. You can either use one of the generic “mail logging” plugins, that would log any mail sent by WordPress, or you can use the Flamingo plugin, which was created by the developer of Contact Form 7. It’s a very minimalistic plugin that shows you an “address book” and a list of mails that have been sent with the forms from Contact Form 7.

Why do I use these plugins?

I use Contact Form 7 in combination with CF7 Apps on two websites that I maintain. On one of them I also use Flamingo. Since both of these pages only need simple forms and I know how to use Contact Form 7 to create usable and accessible forms, installing a “more mature” forms plugin feels like an overkill to me.

Conclusion

If you can handle editing a form using shortcodes and only need simple forms without things like multiple page forms, conditional fields, etc., then Contact Frm 7 might be all you need. Many themes even come with some better default styles, since it’s so widely used. And there are also many plugins adding additional functionality to Contact Form 7, like the other two plugins I’ve presented in this blog post.

Do you also use Contact Form 7? Maybe with other additional plugins? Or do you use a larger form plugin? Then please share your thoughs in a comment.