Create Contact Form with Pirate Forms Plugin in WordPress

Pirate forms is one of the simplest to use WordPress contact form plugin available for WordPress website/blogs. It is free to use plugin built by WordPress developers at Themeisle. It has 100,000+ active downloads as per the writing of this article. It doesn’t offer much features but the distinction is that the interface of the plugin is clean and simple. It is not bloated with features and configuration so, if someone some is in search of a simple contact form, Pirate form would be a great choice. This might be called as the better version of ContactBuddy Plugin. In this post, I will show steps to create Contact Form with Pirate forms Plugin in WordPress.

Features

Simple and easy to use interface.
Spam protection using google reCAPTCHA.
Option to store the contact messages to database.
Configurable SMTP settings for emails.

Create Contact Form with Pirate Forms Plugin in WordPress

Now let’s walk through the installation and configuration of Pirate Forms Plugin to a page.

Step 1. Install the Pirate Forms Plugin

Navigate through Dashboard > Plugins > Add New and in the search box search for Pirate Form (See screenshot above). Click on Install Now button to install the plugin and activate the plugin. After activation, visit the new Pirate Forms menu in the Settings section of your admin dashboard as shown below.

Step 2. Configure Pirate Forms

After you click on Pirate Forms from admin menu, it will show you a dashboard with tabs as shown in the screenshot above. There is a How to use tab, this shows three simple ways to integrate this form to the website/blog. Tabs like Options, Fields requires configuration but other tabs might not need to be configured. But we will walk through each and every tab and explain the use of it.

Click on the Options tab at the top, and you’ll see the interface as in the screenshot below

The first option in the interface is the Contact notification sender email which is used while sending the contact form submissions. Here in the screenshot above, we have given noreply@mustbeweb.com.

The second option is the Contact submission recipients email address that will receive the incoming messages from the contact form. Change it to the email address that you will be using to communicate with the visitors.

If you want to store the contact messages in your database then check mark on the third option- Store submission in the database. The default value for rest of the option is good enough, but you change as per required. Click Save changes to save your configuration till now.

Once the basic configuration is done, we can click Fields tab, which will show options as in screenshot below.

You can configure four basic fields here: Name, Email, Subject, and Message. There an optional setting to add reCAPTCHA to your form for spam protection. Generate reCAPCHA keys from your google account first and add it to your form. It will provide a Site key and a Secret Key. You need to add the keys provided to respective configuration fields.

Also Read: Backup WordPress with WP-DB-Backup Plugin

There are other tabs, which are optional to configure. But, let’s see what’s in it. Click on Labels, in the interface, you have option to change the default labels for the contact form fields. (See screenshot below)

Click on Messages tab (see screenshot below). You can configure the error and form submission message here.

Then finally, click on SMTP tab. You will see a page to configure SMTP settings (see screenshot below). Keep the default settings, it will work fine. This section is useful only if you want to use other email accounts like gmail and third party service providers like sendgrid, mailgun etc. to send emails. So for most of the user, default setting will work charm.

Click on Save changes to save your configuration. Now to add the form to our page, we need to copy the shortcode so, click on How to use tab, locate the shortcode and copy [pirate_forms] shortcode to your clipboard, which is highlighted in the screenshot below.

Step 3. Adding Contact Form to a New Page

The next step is to create an empty page to place the form. Navigate to the Pages menu, and click the Add New link (Dashboard > Pages > Add New). Name it “Contact Us” (see screenshot below), or anything that you like.

Now, paste the shortcode [pirate_forms] into the editor and click on Publish/Update to save. Click on the Permalink below the title of the page or Preview to see the contact form you just created. You contact form will look similar to the screenshot below.

You can add this shortcode to your widgets and unlimited pages/post. But every contact form will be same. So, if you are looking for advance configuration, Fast Contact Form, Ninja Forms might be the plugins that you are looking for. If you receive spams, just enable the reCAPTCHA in the form. Pirate Forms is one of the easy to configure contact forms. Click here to download the plugin and explore more.

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Jems

I am Jems. I am an occasional blogger and technology enthusiastic. I have a passion to learn. I wear multiple hats of web developer, consultant, data analyst and digital marketer. 🙂