Get FAST WordPress Support
STOP Using Contact Form 7 Plugin 1

STOP Using Contact Form 7 Plugin – Here are 7 Alternatives

STOP Using Contact Form 7 Plugin, there are much better alternatives out there.

OK, this is slightly a rant post but think of it more like a public service announcement. Read the next statement very carefully… Please STOP Using Contact Form 7 Plugin!!!

Now this plugin might have over 3 million active installs, but we STRONGLY suggest against using it.  Yes the developer does a great job of providing an easy to use free plugin that he supports and updates often but that is about the only 2 things we can find that are positive about it.

The biggest down side which is extremely important is the fact that this plugin is very script heavy and these scripts are slow and inject themselves on every page in your site when the plugin is active.  Speed is a massive part of the overall visitor experience on your site and also helps the way Google decides to rank your site. 

If you would like to know more on why Contact Form 7 is bad for site speed, please click on the link below.

http://pagepipe.com/contact-form-7-plugin-causes-global-site-drag

Another thing we dislike about this plugin is that while it may be easy to create simple contact forms, scaling it to do other things that are very common in form creation is either not easy or not possible.  Even a basic option like Captcha are hard to integrate for the average WordPress user.

So we wanted to give you some alternatives so you can STOP Using Contact Form 7 Plugin. 

Take a look below at some of our top picks for FREE contact form plugin solutions you can use on your WordPress site.  Here are our favorite 5 alternatives to Contact Form 7 plugin.

read more 1

58 Comments

  • So, which one out of these do you use? Did you find it made a big difference with the site speed?
    Cheers

    Reply
    • The only contact form we have on our site is an eternal contact form so no need for any of these plugins.

      Reply
      • So how do you know the others aren’t dragging the speed down? For form plugins that use a visual interface, all I see is a stack of code behind the scenes to make this possible which, in turn, adds to site speed. If you can’t give an indicator of your suggested plugins, which you don’t use, what’s the point of this article except to bag one of the world’s most popular form plugins.

        Reply
        • This article is not meant to offend anyone. We are simply sharing with others our extensive experience in speeding sites up and this plugin works against that.

          As far and form plugins with a visual interface, yes they have a lot of code to operate but that code is in the admin area and does not reside anywhere on the front end or impact the speed of the browsing experience.

          Just to make it clear again, we do several hundred site speed up services each week and we find Contact Form 7 to be a speed sucker on several of them. The great thing with WP and open source is choices and any user is free to use as they like.

          Reply
  • CF7 scripts loading can be fixed with some simple PHP code, it’s not that big of a deal :)

    Reply
    • The average WP user does not know anything about PHP code or PHP code editing. Simple to some but not all.

      Reply
    • Hey Brani,

      Do you know the PHP code needed to speed up CF7 scripts? Would love some help / to hire someone to help! :D

      Reply
      • We advise not to use this plugin because it is slow. This is the entire point of the article.

        Reply
      • Optimizing Contact Form 7 for Better Performance
        https://code.tutsplus.com/articles/optimizing-contact-form-7-for-better-performance–wp-31255

        Reply
  • I Want a plugin better than contact form the thing is that with this a I can use my own HTML form, and with the other there are predefined form with styles and HTML that it’s difficult to change, is there an alternative to contact form 7 which would allow me to use my own HTML structure?

    Reply
  • Your own contact form uses Jotform, which seems to be slow to load as well, yet this is not on your list.

    Also, the reason why so many people use CF7 is due to many WP Themes coming packaged and integrated with Themes, which is not ideal as many people will simply use what is delivered without changing.

    I keep considering the likes of Gravity, but the minute you want to do more (ie surveys) these become chargeable.

    Reply
    • Hello

      We use JotFormm because of it’s security features of data not being stored at all in WP database and it is not slow at all. Not sure where you see speed issues. Also this article is about Contact Form 7 and our extensive experience with it not about every form that exists out there. Simply our opinion based on years of speeding spites up.

      Anyways thanks for the feedback!

      Reply
  • how do you tackle the issue of grammar or spelling mistakes in form submissions like some people misspell gmial or gemail or yohoo etc etc

    so it creates bounces

    Reply
    • Doubt there is anything to stop people from misspelling things. That is a human error.

      Reply
  • Always used contact form 7 but it’s all of a sudden become a bit of a pain to use, so have recently started using WPForms and I have to say is pretty dam good!

    Simple, easy and some great features

    Reply
  • I wish I could get a contact form without PHP. Where can I get it? I know HTML and CSS, but PHP is a problem for me.

    Reply
    • Well WordPress is largely PHP so all form plugins that work with WP are PHP driven. None of the examples in this post require that you need to know PHP.

      Reply
  • NOW is the best time to ditch CF 7!
    If you follow the CF7 support forum, you probably know by now, that in the recent versions, the developer removed the ability to use reCAPTCHA V2 and forced upon CF7 plugin users reCAPTCHA v3.
    This was the most stupid and disastrous decision this plugin developer has ever made.
    Any user which updated the CF7 plugin to a version above 5.0.5 , got into trouble immediately. reCATCHA v3 caused a huge number of websites to break, be flooded with spam, not able to send/receive forms etc. You name it.
    Users got furious, frustrated and felt betrayed by the plugin developer, Just look at the support forum to see the scale of anger and frustration.
    They all begged the developer to re-enable reCAPTCHA V2. In the meantime, the only solution was to downgrade to version 5.0.5.
    We all waited with anticipation for the next plugin update, since everyone rightfully believed he can’t ignore his users and leave them like that.
    But today, the waiting and uncertainty period finally ended.
    The plugin developer announced that he doesn’t have any plans to re-enable reCAPTCHA v2.
    This was indeed very bad news for all us users. BUT, on the other hand, we now know where we stand.
    Many, I guess millions, are now actively looking for an alternative FREE form plugin, which enables reCAPTCHA .v2.
    So this article really comes in handy now. Good job and thank you very much.
    I guess today marks the beginning of the sad fall of the CF 7 plugin.

    Reply
    • You are correct. That’s a very wrong move by developer and I forgot read the changelog before updating the plugin. Now we are left with no choice apart from using other contact forms and that’s how I landed on this post. Moreover the captcha v3 adds it’s logo in a place where we have move to top button. This is disgusting and I haven’t found a way to disable it.

      Reply
  • Hi there – thank you very much for this! My question may not make sense, but do any of these integrate with mailchimp? What I’d like is a contact form on my site where people can contact me with a question, but what I’d like to happen is that simultaneously those people who fill it out get added to MailChimp. Is this possible? Or would I then just use Mailchimp directly to create a form to subscribe, and add a field for their comment and then have MailChimp notify me about it? But how do I then reply without having to retype the email address into a new email? I guess what I’m asking is, can I use MailChimp as a form builder as well, or do any of these form builders integrate with it?

    Reply
    • You need to ask the plugin developer. Likely adapt to theme or option to do either.

      Reply
  • I am still having AJAX issues in the wpcf7.initForm and from the forums on their site ti has been over 1.5 years since this issue was first reported. Very sad because it broke a lot of links and is used widely in my WPMU sites, and there are DOZENS of them inside that install. Trying to integrate with SalesForce so I am gonna try the form ninja thing. But if you are reading this chances are you also saw the hundreds of 1 star reviews being left to cf7. It was an institution of WP, I have been using since 2010. but moving on.

    Reply
  • While some of these may be great, all but Visual Form Builder charge a fee for things like conditional logic, file attachments, multi-part forms, etc. where you can add all of those functionalities to CF7 for no charge

    Also I didn’t see any of these form providers that provided any kind of add-on to fill PDF forms, as we do for several of our CF7 forms.

    Reply
    • So what is wrong with spending less than $20 in many cases to get a robust easy to use form plugin? Just because WP is free does not mean you always have to find free plugins as well. Also Gravity Forms will PDF forms.

      Reply
      • The problem with many of these plugin builders is they go out of business or just stop support as WP updates then you are stuck with a piece of junk and have to start all over again. Been there done that. CF7 is a pain in the arse because you have to dig into CSS and all that garbage to make it work. I am a small business owner not a programmer, I used to be, but I have no time to waste on the intricacies of CSS and all that crap. I am running a business. Business owners could care less about that stuff but employees or contractors to do it are too expensive for small business. So easy to use drag and drop is the way to go but you expose yourself to them going out of business so it’s back to the nightmare called CF7. FC7 really is a piece of crap though you will find fan boys all over the place and most of them are employees somewhere spending someone else’s nickle.

        Reply
  • Which of these alternatives are WPML compatible? One of the reasons I use CF7 is precisely because WPML supports it officially.

    Reply
  • If I use a default PHP form instead of a plugin and create a custom template in child theme folder.
    Is this a secure way to do? Does wordpress do all the php updates when it releases a new WP version?

    I wonder what’s more secure, a custom created PHP form or a plug-in where developers are behind it and take care for the updates.

    Reply
  • Which contact from (other than 7) supports the ability to send the form submitter an email with an attachment after they submit?

    Reply
  • Thanks for this. Contact Form 7 has been a glitchy POS from day one and after trouble shooting it again for over 2 hours I’m moving on. Never again!

    Reply
  • Very glad I stumbled across this article. I have been fighting trying to get CF7 to work on my site. All other mail works but not the contact form. It’s a complete pain in the rear. You have confirmed for me that I am not a complete idiot and time to move on with another contact form. Too many hours wasted on CF7.

    Reply
  • We have a form made with Contact Form 7 that used to work but stopped working.

    We had a drop-down list of possible recipients of the message, and the respondent could choose who should get an email notification of the message. For every choice, one copy would go to our office staff and one copy would go to one of our volunteers.

    Now Contact Form 7 has stopped sending email notifications, so we can only see the form response if we check Flamingo every day.

    Can you tell me if any of these would allow for email notifications to a choice of recipients/

    Which of these would also store responses in an online database like Flamingo (or even in a csv file that we can access).

    Reply
    • Best would be to reach out to the plugin developer with your specific questions.

      Reply
  • I enjoyed this article. My first job working on an existing WP site was to redo the whole site from scratch because “nobody uses it, it isn’t mobile friendly, it’s hard to update, it costs a fortune advertsing it”. They had the Contact Form 7 Plugin already installed, and zero form fill out’s made no sense to me but to them no smoke meant no fire so “leave that alone” were my instructions and don’t waste time fixing what isn’t broken.
    So, I sort of followed instructions (by spending no time on it) and I just deactivated it and utilised an existing but unused Mailchimp account they had and for fun (because I hadnt used it much but always wanted to) I utilised Google Forms which was part of their “G-Suite” subscription. No big deal especially as they were using it for e-mail, cloud storage, Google Docs etc etc so what could go wrong?
    Unfortunately, the office staff all commented on how much faster the website was and more online enquiries came thru over the next 30 days than the previous year. So now the new website was no longer a priority seeing as the old one was now doing fine and I was no longer needed. I heard things really hit the fan when the new Office/Marketing Manager that was hired to work full time to handle the enquiries couldn’t use Mailchimp, Google or WordPress. Lol.

    Reply
  • I have used several contact forms and formidable has been the best. After using it for a couple years I bought the pro version and love it. I have the pro version for wp forms also, but like formidable the best. Formidable also has color styling options in free and paid. Support on both forms has been good.

    Reply
  • Thanks for the tips. In my search for an alternative to Contact Form 7, I found out something interesting. What do you think of SimpleForm – The simplest way to add a contact form ?
    Keep up the good work.

    Reply
  • Do all or any of these forms support Google recaptcha integration?

    We get a lot of spam.

    Reply
    • Some have this included at no cost and others it might be a paid add-on.

      Reply
  • Thank you for a well written article. I was tired of using Contact form 7 all of these years on all of our websites and needed a change. You lead me to Ninja Forms and I am so happy with the results! cheers!

    Reply
  • After a server move I just ran into massive problems with Contact Form 7 (the famous spinning wheel). After days of testing — without any result rather than frustration — I found your article and replaced one CF7 form with WPForms. Gutess what: It worked right out of the box.

    I will see how CF7 support will deal with my ticket (https://wordpress.org/support/topic/no-email-sent-spinning-wheel/). If they can solve the problem I would still consider to stick to CF7 due to the various options it has in the free version.

    From your experience: Could you recommend a free alternative that has similar features? WPForms in the free version is rather limited.

    Cheers, Frank

    Reply
    • If your site is important to you do not search for free solutions. Invest in it and pay for plugins.

      Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *