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For a client I used a free WordPress plugin WP Forms [1], for free you can create unlimited forms, receive unlimited messages, build forms with a nice UI [2] and you own all the data/don't call third party services. Recommended.

Yes, it works only on WordPress, in my use case, my client had a non-WordPress site, and we make a Help site on help.domain.com with WordPress, and the contact form on help.domain.com/contact.

[1] https://wordpress.org/plugins/wpforms-lite/

[2] https://youtu.be/H5t3Zkx8ccc

3 comments

The issue with forms is twofold.

The first is the UI - the design, logic, etc. Any reasonable form builder will give you this.

The bigger issue is the deliverability aspect. This to me is the killer. Having to setup all the stuff around email deliverability is a horror - SPF, DKIM, DMARC - then monitor. It's awful, and it's especially awful if you're doing it on behalf of multiple clients.

I'd assume the WP plugin would take advantage of direct access to the DB. Show all the form submissions in the admin and let the site owner reply directly with their email.

no neef for any emails in the plugin directly - unless you'd want to

Some hosts will require that you also install an SMTP plugin and use a 3rd party service like Sendgrid or Mailgun to authenticate and send the messages. If you have a professional web developer to help, this is usually fine, but if you don't, then this step will often times stop people in their tracks.

Many Wordpress plugins have lite and paid versions - and often do a bad job around spam etc

Spam is largely solved because they all integrate with Akismet. I have a WP site that gets 500k monthly pageviews and Akismet catches all our spam