Contact form template

Why a contact form beats a mailto link

An email address printed on a page is the cheapest contact method and the most expensive to live with. Scrapers harvest it within days, so a good share of what arrives is not from customers. What is from customers arrives as free text: no company, no category, sometimes no reply address that matches the sender. You sort it by hand, every day, forever.

A form fixes three things at once. Bots get nothing to harvest, because there is no address in the markup and public submissions run through invisible reCAPTCHA v3. Every inquiry arrives structured, with a name, a valid email and a category attached. And that category is a routing signal, which is the difference between an inbox and a queue. Send it straight to a channel with the Slack integration and the right person sees it first. A mailto link also tells you nothing about itself; a form tells you who opened it, who started, who finished and where the rest stopped, which is the point of per-question drop-off analytics.

How many fields a contact form should have

Four to six. Below four you are missing something you will have to email back and ask for; above six you are asking strangers to fill in a job application before they know whether you can help. Name, email, category and message is the irreducible set. Company earns its place when a business inquiry is worth handling differently, which is why it sits here as an optional fifth.

Everything past six should be earned rather than shown. Need a budget range? Ask it only of the people who said Sales. Need an order number? Ask it only of the people who said Support. That is what the logic in this template does, and it is why the form stays short for everyone while still collecting what you need from the people who matter. More on that trade-off in our guide to form design best practices. Two things to leave off: a phone number, unless you really will call, and a dropdown asking how they heard about you.

Where to put the contact form

On a page of its own at /contact, linked from the footer of every page, carrying the form and almost nothing else. Someone who reached your contact page has already decided. Then embed the same form where the question actually occurs: at the bottom of pricing, at the end of a long docs page, inside the help center. Sharing and embedding gives you a public link and an iframe snippet from one published form, so every placement writes into a single responses table. For a paid landing page, use a lead capture form instead. Different job, different questions.