Every WordPress site needs a contact form, and most site owners start with a free plugin. The trouble usually comes later: the form works, but the free version caps the number of fields, stops saving entries after a certain number, or keeps the answers behind a paid upgrade.
This guide shows how to build a contact form in about five minutes with Legba Form, a free plugin with no limit on forms, fields or entries. You will end up with a working form, an email to your team for each message, and a confirmation to the person who wrote.
What to check before choosing a free form plugin
Three questions save a lot of frustration:
- Are entries saved on your site? Email alone is fragile. If one message lands in spam, it is gone unless the plugin also keeps a copy.
- Is there a cap? Look for limits on the number of forms, fields or entries per month.
- What does spam protection cost your visitors? A CAPTCHA puzzle stops some robots, and some real people too.
Legba Form saves every entry in your WordPress dashboard, has no caps, and blocks spam without puzzles: an invisible honeypot, a minimum filling time and a rate limit per visitor.
Step 1: install Legba Form
- In your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins → Add New.
- Search for Legba Form.
- Click Install Now, then Activate.
The plugin is free on WordPress.org. There is no account to create and no license key.
Step 2: start from the Contact template
Go to Legba Form → New form and choose the Contact template. It gives you six fields: name, email, phone, subject, message and a consent checkbox.
The builder shows the real form. Click a field to change its label or make it required, drag it to move it, or delete the ones you do not need. A short form gets more answers: if you never call people back, remove the phone field.
Step 3: set the emails
Open the Emails tab. A form can send as many emails as you want; for a contact form, two are enough:
- An email to your team, with all the answers. Set the reply-to to the visitor’s address so that you can answer with one click.
- A confirmation to the visitor, so that they know the message arrived. Use the
{all_fields}merge tag to include a copy of what they sent.
Step 4: publish the form
Open the Share tab and copy the shortcode, which looks like . Paste it into your Contact page, or add the Legba Form block in the editor and pick your form. Use the preview to check the form on a phone before publishing.
Send yourself a test message. It should appear under Legba Form → Entries, and both emails should arrive.
If the emails do not arrive
This is the most common problem with any WordPress form, and the form plugin is rarely the cause. By default, WordPress sends email with the server’s basic mail function, which many mailboxes block or mark as spam.
- Check that the entry was saved under Legba Form → Entries. If it is there, the form works and the problem is email delivery.
- Use a sender address on your own domain, such as hello@yourdomain.com, not a Gmail or Outlook address.
- Install an SMTP plugin and connect it to your email provider. This fixes most delivery problems.
Where to go from here
The same plugin handles multi-step forms, conditional logic, file uploads and exports to Excel, all in the free version. When you need payments, signatures or connections to tools like Google Sheets, Legba Form Pro has a 14-day free trial.