How To Ensure A WordPress Contact Page Gets Business?
For any business with a WordPress website, especially a local business, one of the most important pages is the contact page.
If your contact page and form are not well-designed and inspire credibility with your visitors, you may be losing a lot more business than you know.
So how can you ensure that your contact page is designed to get you loads of business inquiries? Here are some best practices for WordPress contact pages.
1. Keep your design simple
Your contact page is not meant for showcasing your cleverness. Complicated designs can confuse and turn away visitors, making it less likely that they will fill in your form. Your form should inspire trust.
You want a simple, intuitive interface with a clear message. In that way, a contact page is a lot like a landing page, and its function is to help you get as many business inquiries as possible.
2. Make sure your contact form works reliably
Using a free WordPress contact form plugin that might or might not work is taking too big of a risk with your business. It’s worth spending a few bucks if you can ensure that your contact form works every time.
You also need to ensure that your contact form is responsive and works on every mobile device. Always test your contact form on multiple devices to make sure it works reliably.
Here are some of the most reliable contact form plugins you can install on your WordPress site:
A simple, but popular contact form plugin, it can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, Captcha, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
This plugin creates responsive forms and manages submissions easily with a simple drag and drop interface. There are no limitations to the number of forms, fields, emails, actions, or submissions.
You can use this plugin to design contact forms, subscription forms, or any other form for WordPress. There are also a number of professional extensions available to add functionality.
• WP Contact Form Widget WordPress Plugin
A simple WordPress contact form widget plugin that adds contact forms to posts, pages and widget areas. You can also use shortcodes to place a contact form within your posts or on specific pages, and enable captcha to avoid spam messages.
This contact form plugin is integrated with ContactUs.com’s customer acquisition software suite. It comes with a free, secure account registration, used to manage your form settings, software integrations and contact form submissions.
Contact forms can be created with several basic designs. Premium users can add custom background images or choose from premium design templates.
Add customized form content (headline, field labels, submission button), social media links, “About Us” text and Google Maps.
Additionally, you can customize your confirmation page text. Premium features include SMS notifications, A/B Testing, Retargeting Alerts, advanced lead analytics, and call tracking.
3. Add these elements to your contact page
Besides a contact form, you need to make sure your contact page has all the contact information your visitors need to locate your business and get in touch with you. Besides the contact form, here are some of the essential elements you need to include on your WordPress contact page.
• A menu linking to your other pages
If the contact form is part of your site, it will have the same menu as your other pages. If it is based on a different template, you need to include a menu linking to other pages on your site, so your visitors can browse your site, should they choose to.
You might also need to redirect visitors to other pages, if you have different contact pages for different purposes. For instance, if you have a separate page for guest bloggers with special instructions for them, you might have to link to it from your main contact page, so you can direct guest bloggers to the information they need.
• A Boilerplate
A boilerplate is a short description of your business. It is a good thing to include for visitors who land on your website via your contact form, and want to know more about you.
Don’t forget that a contact form is one more landing page that can be found in the search engines for terms you choose. Include a well-written and descriptive paragraph, and optimize it for keywords that describe your business services and products, and how they benefit your customer.
Keep it short – not more than one or two paragraphs at the most. If they want to know more about your services, they will browse your website.
• Social follow buttons
Social follow buttons are an essential part of your contact page, if you want to grow your fans and followers. It gives your visitors another way to connect to you and keep in touch with you. If you don’t want to include buttons, you can use links to your social profiles.
It’s advisable to link to your business profiles, rather than your personal profiles, unless you’re a solopreneur. Whether you use follow buttons or links, always ensure that they open out into a new window so your visitors are not redirected away from your website. Don’t forget to include your Skype address too.
• NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number)
If you have a local business, the business name, address and phone number (or NAP) are important elements to include on your contact page, especially from a local SEO point of view.
When Google is validating your business location, they will check to see if your NAP details match the ones on your contact page. You need to ensure they do.
Because so many people now access websites on their mobile phones, you must also ensure that your phone number is clickable on a mobile device so your visitors can just click to call you. The page here has HTML code and instructions on how to make a clickable phone link.
• Google Map
Having a Google Map on your contact page matters more for local businesses, such as retail stores, restaurants and hotels, that depend on walk-in customers.
Most premium contact form plugins will let you add a Google map, but if they don’t, you can do it manually. Watch the video below for a tutorial on how to add a Google map to your WordPress contact page.
• Clickable email links
If email is the best way to contact you, and you want your visitors to be able to click on an email link on your page to send you a message from their email client, you should include clickable email links in your page.
It also makes it easy for smartphone users to send you a quick email from their email client. If you want to code your email links to prevent spam bots from harvesting them, use the instructions on the page here.
Do you have any tips of your own for creating a WordPress contact page? Please add them in the comments below.
Image source: 92pixels
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