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Contact forms for static sites
depricated
Member
in General
The contact form is the only component I can think of that is keeping me from a static site for an "online presence" small business website. I was formerly sold on Grav, but lately read great recommendations and arguments for Hugo with Gitlab Pages or Netlify.
What are contact form solutions for static sites?
Ideally:
- free (hey, this is LET right?
) I don't expect many submissions, so the 100 or so for free tiers should be more than enough. - form can be multilingual along with the rest of the site
- keeps the contact email hidden from spammers
- form gets sent to an email
- replying to the email gets sent to the original respondent (i.e. correct "reply to" address)
- custom (optional), multilingual (desired) form submission "thank you" message/page
What I've found so far:
- https://www.netlify.com/docs/form-handling/ Netlify's own form handling seems nice since it's in-house and doesn't require another service/site. Downsides are that it seems the "reply to" email is fixed to [email protected] and it's not clear to me if different languages can be used.
- https://formspree.io/ Exposed email in page source
otherwise seems neat and doesn't even require signing up. - https://kwes.io/ Free tier seems pretty restrictive compared to others.
- https://www.99inbound.com/ Seems interesting. Email notifications don't look like they can be replied to directly.
- https://www.emailmeform.com/ Also interesting. Perhaps same issues.
Anything else? How to choose?
Privacy is another concern with these third parties intercepting what could be business leads. Does that concern anyone else?
Comments
https://1stwebdesigner.com/php-contact-form-html/
https://blog.teamtreehouse.com/create-ajax-contact-form
You can either send the form data via post to a PHP script and set the script send the mail via PHP Mailer. For custom 'thank you' page, you can redirect to something like yoursite.com/thankyou
You can also send through ajax and when the script returns 200, you can change the textarea to a thank you page. Backend shouldn't be that different compared to the first one.
I'm not a web developer so you might have to dumb this down for me. How is a PHP script to run on a static site? Also, I'd rather not get into coding too much myself for the sake of simplicity and security.
For the php script, you'll need to run it on a seperate host (for a simple PHP script, it would cost a few bucks an year). It's just simple copy&paste (you might want to add a reCAPTCHA though, which will add an extra few lines but worth it).
At that point I'd probably rather just stick with Grav and host the site all in one place.
Read this...
https://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/create-a-contact-form-in-php--cms-32314
Hi @Depricated, my name is Erik and I'm a Co-Founder of Kwes. Thank you for mentioning Kwes.io as a form solution for static sites. I love to hear what others have to say about our product and welcome any comment or suggestion. I would like to address your concern about our limited free plan.
I'm assuming you are referring to the number of submissions we allow monthly. If you only compare the number of submissions then your really missing out on so much more.
All of these features help developers work more efficiently and offer the best form experience to their customers, for free! I'm interested to know what type of form your building and how many submissions do you need monthly?
Ultimate lowend contact form: a MAILTO link :-)
Not even one word Google found in this page. Google forms is literally the 1st when I think about online form. You don't want Google branding? That's fine. Just copy the source code and style and modify it as you wish. You can send the form thorough Ajax, not even your visitor will know you use Google forms.
It comes with free and unlimited submission. What else could you ask?
@ErikG Thank you for clarifying the additional features of Kwes.io . I'm not a developer so I'm thinking more as an end user. Yes, I was referring to the limit of 15 submissions per month on the free plan. I don't know exactly how many submissions the site is likely to encounter, but 15 (though likely sufficient) would cause anxiety compared to the limit of 100 from alternatives, which I would be pretty confident is far from the number needed.
@raindog308 Definitely thought of that nice and easy solution. There are two problems:
All I'm looking for is a "form" that is exactly equivalent to a prospective customer sending an email, but which addresses the two points above.
I'm not looking to code or maintain forms, php scripts, servers, and hope to keep the number of third parties to a minimum.
@yokowasis Thanks for mentioning Google forms. It says free for personal use. I wonder if using it on a business website would be a problem. Also can it be integrated into the look/theme of a website? I'd want to avoid it being on a completely different page, and just have a nice "Contact Us" section at the bottom of a one page site.
$9 a month for forms? Really?
Man. I know everyone has to eat but wtfffffffff
Isn't it cheaper/better to just pay for squarespace or something like it where u get hosting, website, all kinds of forms, etc for the same price.
Really good watermarked paper isn't cheap.
For a static website I suggest using a static form produced in the HTML language and a program called CGI that can be done by you even at home during this weekend.
What if I'm not home this weekend?
Could you elaborate?
I prefer to limit my submission to teh goggle ...
But yes, it may be a decent option for the (likely) majority who dgaf about that
Dear Mr depricated at the moment I do not have time to elaborate. I am sorry. You can find more information on a website called bing. When I need some important information, I'll go there. Thank you.
Bing? Seriously?
You could probably do something with the Zapier free tier and webhooks.
Coincidentally, just cashed my 50th $5 Amazon gift card from Microsoft for using Bing. Results are practically the same as Google's and, well, Microsoft is willing to pay people to use it. Of course, that $250 was over about 8 years, but hey, I'm going to be googling...er, binging anyway, so why not, if MSFT is going to be stupid.
For google form you can try follow this guide https://www.developerdrive.com/add-google-forms-static-site/
I am not aware of personal use. Pretty sure it can be used by anyone. Personal or business. As in integrating, I already said it before. You can just copy the source code of the Google form and paste it on your page. No need for new page, or if rame. It will be just like your other page.
Amazon SES has various REST APIs...perhaps other services do as well.
In theory, could you present a form and then when it's submitted, call an Amazon SES REST API from the clientside JS to send the actual email? However, I'm not sure how you'd get around having your credentials in the Javascript, at least for SES.
Just an idea...probably a half-baked one.
Thanks @hardgamers that article is helpful! So maybe google forms is feasible. I'm not familiar with it, but it's worth looking into. Wondering if the collected responses can be formed into an email notification which can then be replied to directly. Thanks to @yokowasis for mentioning this option.
@jh I keep seeing this Zapier thing mentioned everywhere. It seems like https://ifttt.com/ for web stuff.
@raindog308 lolol I had no idea M$ pays for use of bing. Interesting...
So, it is possible to have contact forms for static sites. Whether they can do what is desired remains to be seen. Now the real question is, is it worth the hassle vs a regular non-static (Grav) site, which would avoid these extra third-party solutions?
Checkout https://getform.io/
Good to know, but:
Sounds like somebody's weekend project. Go for it.
There's a million cgi-bin contact us scripts out there. Here's one:
https://boutell.com/email/
No need for 3rd party services or loading up languages in your webserver to do such a trivial task.
Cloudflare worker http api + mailgun?
Just post a slightly obfuscated email address (name AT domain DOT tld) and have decent spam filtering on your inbox. Contact forms are annoying. If you must, post the address as a gif.
Thanks! I really know nothing about cgi scripts. Can they be used when hosting on netlify or gitlab pages? Also, I thought I read sendmail isn't very reliable and smtp is preferred?
Seems complicated and overkill. But thanks for the suggestion.
Of course that's the simplest, but contact forms should reduce the resistance to engagement and look more professional. Still if things get too unwieldy or I need a quick solution, this is always in mind.