Disclosure: This blog post is sponsored by WPForms (which is owned by Awesome Motive). There may be more article’s like this in the future but I will continue to provide a disclosure similar to this every time. There will be multiple affiliate links in this article but they will be clearly labelled by mentioning in brackets after the product name that it is an affiliate link.
There are many things WordPress can do, and when you add a contact form you may think it’s just a contact form (and sometimes it is) but some of the more popular contact forms can do much more.
Some of these things you may already know if you read our blog, like file uploading. If you need a file from someone who is filling in a form you don’t have to ask them to send you an email or go to a separate website just to upload something. You can add that right within your contact form. We have written about 4 ways to get files from your clients that don’t involve a USB flash drive that you can read after you finish reading this.
You may think that you need to install a shopping addon (like WooCommerce) to be able to accept payments on your website, but that isn’t the case anymore. Many popular contact form addons like WPForms (affiliate link) have a plan and an addon that allows you to accept payments. These payments won’t go through your own website, they will instead go through a site like Paypal or Stripe which does mean they collect a little bit but that is the cost for taking credit card payments. How you add Paypal or Stripe to your contact form depends on what contact form you are using, if you are using WPForms as an example they provide guides on how to add both Paypal (affiliate link) and Stripe (affiliate link) in documentation on their site so you can follow their step-by-step directions.
Sometimes someone need to be notified when a form is completed so action can quickly be taken. Instead of requiring someone to spend all day on your website just refreshing the completed contact forms, many contact forms allow integration with apps like Trello, Zapier, Slack and many more. This way the completed contact form can be assigned to them, they can instantly be notified, or many other options based on what the contact form has and what you and your business are using. Many of the premium WordPress contact form plugins offer this option, you may have to look under addons on the plugin’s site to find these.
Zapier is one option that was mentioned, and Zapier can do a ton more. It has over 2000 apps that integrates with it, which means there are so many possibilities. For example, you could have all completed forms be saved into a google sheets spreadsheet, or automatically create a customer service ticket when a certain form is completed, and many more options. If you are looking for this when choosing a contact form plugin, then look for a Zapier addon on the features or addon page of the plugin.
You could use a separate company or site if you need to get a survey out, you may have not known that some contact form plugin have an ability to do survey’s. This is easier for you as you may already know how to edit your contact form, so instead of learning a new system just to setup a survey you can use the same system to setup a survey. As an example, WPForms has this ability (affiliate link) in their pro plan (affiliate link).
User registration is something that some websites may want, but other sites have no need for. You may want your website to allow guest bloggers, you may want a membership site, you may want to get your readers contact information for marketing and more(thanks to themefuse for some of these). You could of course just enable registration on your WordPress site but if you use a contact form plugin that has the ability to do user registration you can do tons more. Like not just registering the person on your site, but adding that persons contact information to your newsletter (you can only do so only if they allow you to do so) are just two examples.
One last thing to close out this post, automatic calculations. If you have set prices for certain things then this automatic calculations would save tons of time and one example is getting a quote to the potential client quicker. Some contact form plugins have this option, and some don’t. If you want this feature, Formidable Forms (affiliate link) is one that has this with both calculated fields (affiliate link) and pricing fields (affiliate link).
There are many features that contact form plugins have that we may not always know about, sometimes it requires spending time on their features or addons page to see what they offer. Some of the major contact form plugins are WPForms (affiliate link), Formidable Forms (affiliate link), Ninja Forms (affiliate link), Caldera Forms and there are many more WordPress contact form plugins out there.
