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Contact Forms for Static Websites

When taking your WordPress site static, one of the most common changes you’ll need to make are getting your contact forms working.

Why don’t WordPress contact forms “just work” on my static site?

Most contact forms for WordPress, whether installed via a plugin or included with your theme or pagebuilder, are dependent on server-side code for submitting the form data. The client (the user’s browser) submits the form data to a PHP script, which handles the mailing, via your own server or using a service such as MailGun, SendGrid, Postmark, etc.

Not having these server side scripts available is part of the security & performance benefits of going static. But it means we need somewhere else to post our form data. Luckily, we have a multitude of options.

Netlify makes it dead simple

If you’re using Netlify to host your static site, the process to convert an existing contact form to work on Netlify is also quite simple.

From their Forms documentation:

Code an HTML form into any page on your site, add a netlify attribute or data-netlify=“true” to the

tag, and you can start receiving submissions in your Netlify site admin panel.

Embeddable hosted forms

As with any embeddable content, like a map or social media feed, embeddable contact forms work just the same on your static site as they do in a regular WordPress site.

 Searching for “embeddable contact form” will yield plenty of results to review, with different prices and features, such as Google Forms, Kontact and Cognito Forms.

There is also the purely JS + API email form service, EmailJS, which can connect to common transactional email providers.

You can find even more form options in Strattic’s static tool directory.

Self/cloud-hosted form handling services

For those wanting to keep everything under their own control, deploying a form handling script on your own servers or at least your own cloud instances offers more privacy protection. Whether a custom script or something like Formplug for AWS Lambda, you can have greater control over your data.

Strattic supports popular contact forms

If you’re looking for an easy way to get up and running with contact forms without a workaround, you could try Strattic! It’s an end-to-end managed WordPress to static publishing and hosting platform with out-of-the-box support for some of the most popular WordPress plugins such as Gravity Forms, Contact Form 7 and Elementor forms so that transitioning to a WordPress-to-static site is as smooth as possible.

Use no contact form at all

You don’t have to use a contact form on your site. A simple mailto link is still a valid option and you can even improve the UX a bit by pre-filling the message subject and body: 

mailto:help@oldwp2staticwww.netlify.com?subject=Question%20about%20contact%20forms&body=Hi%20there%2C%20I%20just%20read%20your%20article%20about%20contact%20forms%20and%20want%20to%20ask%20you%20further%20questions.%20When%27s%20a%20good%20time%20to%20chat%3F