The competition amongst online businesses has only increased over the years. There are more people than ever going into business, all vying for the same customer base. This has forced website owners to up their marketing efforts to stand out. It has also pressured website owners to be more readily available for customer questions, concerns, and complaints to retain their customers’ business.
As a website owner, you must provide site visitors with multiple ways to contact you. In addition, it is crucial you make getting in touch with you as easy as possible for any site visitor, no matter their issue, location on your website, or device they are contacting you from.
Some great ways you may be stepping up your contact game is to have a live chat box near the bottom of your site or a phone number to call for a one-on-one conversation. After all, these methods are practical, relatively instant, and convenient for you and your customers.
But let’s face it, many people are too busy or distracted to pick up the phone and call or interrupt their work online to chat with someone live.
Adding a contact form on your website is a good idea to cater to those who still prefer plain old email correspondence to ask questions, raise concerns, or share their bad experiences with you. Plus, forms sent this way are done on your customer’s time and can be directed to the appropriate department once you receive them.
Today we are going to measure two of the most popular contact forms – Contact Form 7 and Ninja Forms – against each other to see which one might be the right choice for you. Since all websites have different target audiences with different needs, don’t be surprised that the most commonly used contact form is not always the best option.
Contact Form 7: An Introduction
Contact Form 7 is one of the oldest and most popular contact forms found in the WordPress Repository to date. It has over 3 million active installations and a 4.6-star rating.
With this contact form, you can manage multiple forms and place them anywhere on your WordPress website. It is built with clean code, so it never affects the speed and performance of your site. In addition, it supports other popular plugins such as Aksimet, CAPTCHA plugins, and AJAX power submitting.
Ninja Forms: An Introduction
Ninja Forms is yet another popular contact form, though it pales in comparison to the popularity of Contact Form 7. It boasts a solid 900K+ user base and a 4.4-star rating and remains a powerful, flexible, easy-to-use contact form option.
Using this contact form plugin, you are in control of everything. From the general settings to individual fields, submission actions, and email responses, you decide every design and functionality element on your contact forms. Plus, it easily integrates into WordPress using a widget, shortcode, or template function.
Ultimately, Contact Form 7 and Ninja Forms are suitable contact form solutions for anyone with a WordPress website. However, we are going to put them head to head and see how they match up against each other
Setup, Configuration, and Use
Contact Form 7
There is debate about whether Contact Form 7’s interface is as user-friendly for new website owners as possible. Though easily used by experienced developers, configuring and using this plugin is not entirely intuitive.
However, it should be noted that upon installation and activation of Contact Form 7, a convenient menu item in the WordPress dashboard labeled Contact is created to help guide users in form creation and editing.
When it comes to using Contact Form 7, one hang-up inexperienced website owners may face the need to use HTML markup to create forms. Though generally easy to use, a learning curve is required that not all website owners want to invest their time in.
Once the contact form is drawn up, add an embedded shortcode to any of your posts or pages, and your form will be displayed to site visitors. Overall, this basic contact form rejects flashy features and extensive functionality.
Ninja Forms
Installing and activating the core Ninja Forms plugin onto your website is done like any other plugin. From there, you have very general settings to configure. Instead, you can jump right into creating a contact form.
Adding forms to your website is as easy as selecting Add New and using the drag & drop form builder to add the fields you want. After building the form to your liking, all you have to do is add the generated shortcode anywhere on your site for it to appear on the front end.
The great thing about Ninja Forms is that it comes packed full of neat features for website owners to take advantage of:
- Manage, edit, and export all received submissions
- Save important fields for later use
- Utilize the date picker as an interactive element
- Message your team once a submission is received
- Provide customized submission confirmations
In the end, Ninja Forms has a lot more functionality than the basic setup of Contact Form 7.
Customizations
Contact Form 7
Since Contact Form 7 is a simple contact form plugin, there is little you can do regarding customization. However, you can modify the form, mail, and message settings. In addition, you can add custom elements such as extra text or images in between pre-defined fields using HTML markup.
Though Contact Form 7 is a minimal contact form plugin, there are several third-party add-ons available to help extend the design and functionality of your forms:
- Contact Form 7 Select Box Editor Button. Give your site visitors the option to choose where their inquiry is submitted.
- Custom Skins Contact Form 7. You can customize the look and feel of your forms to match your brand.
- Contact Form 7 MailChimp Extension. let your readers subscribe as they submit their form.
- Contact Form 7 – Success Page Redirects. Redirect visitors to a success page once they submit their form.
- Contact Form 7 PayPal Add-on. You can integrate PayPal into your forms so visitors can buy products while submitting their forms.
Ninja Forms
Thanks to the drag & drop form builder that comes with Ninja Forms, you don’t have to have any coding knowledge to use this plugin. That said, there are plenty of ways you can customize your Ninja Forms to meet your design and functionality needs:
- Configure where form submissions get sent to your team
- Determine submission actions
- Access functions, action hooks, and filters
- Easily translate in to any language
- Create a subscription form, survey, or any other type of web form
- Enjoy third-party integrations such as MailChimp, Zoho, and PayPal
Lastly, you can access plenty of Ninja Form extensions here for adding conditional logic, making multi-part forms, improving user management, saving progress, and even allowing for PDF form submissions.
Price
Contact Form 7
The Contact Form is always free to download in the WordPress Repository, which also contains many add-ons for extending the plugin’s functionality and design.
Ninja Forms
As with Contact Form 7, the Ninja Forms core plugin is free in the WordPress Repository or the official Ninja Forms website.
However, you will have to pay for any extensions. Depending on which add-ons you need, this can make for an expensive contact form.
Ninja Forms has a few different premium plans for websites with increased form demands:
Support
Contact Form 7
This plugin comes with limited, though adequate, support. For example, access a list of help articles here, answers to FAQs here, and submit questions on their forum here.
Ninja Forms
On the other hand, Ninja Forms offers excellent support and information for those needing help.
To start, they have extensive documentation here and a regularly updated blog here. In addition, for those using either the free or premium version, you can contact the support team and get a response within 24 hours or less.
Final Thoughts
Ultimately, choosing the right contact form can be overwhelming when you step back and see just how many options there are in the WordPress Repository. However, if you dig a little deeper and weed out the forms you know do not have the functionality or design elements your website needs, it is fairly easy to narrow it down to a handful of options.
Typically, Contact Form 7 and Ninja Forms will always make the final list. That’s why this matchup is so important. It lays the foundation for each plugin and helps you better understand what each option offers regarding features, price, and support.
Ultimately, either of these options will help you stay in touch with your customers, readily answer any inquiries, and improve customer satisfaction, thus making you a standout business amongst the sea of companies fighting for your customer’s attention.
Have you ever used Contact Form 7 or Ninja Forms? Which one did you prefer and why? I would love to hear all about it in the comments below!
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