Contact forms are a great way to collect information from your website visitors, establish a line of communication, and generate new business leads. One of the most popular contact form systems out there with over 1 million installations (and the one that I prefer myself) is called Contact Form 7.

Contact Form 7, along with some custom CSS, makes it possible to build a form that is user-friendly while still gathering the necessary information to make your job easier.

You can add an email address to each contact form on your site where the submission will be sent to. This is very convenient because you are alerted immediately after a customer attempts to contact you. This is the default behavior for the plugin: a user submits a form and it is emailed to the designated addresses.

It seems that your work here is done and there is nothing else to consider in the chain of communication. Don’t forget about what may happen when something goes wrong!

What if you accidentally delete a form submission email or you have an employee that isn’t properly following up with customers? You would need to log in and see a list of all the forms that have been submitted to figure things out.

Many users are surprised to find that Contact Form 7 doesn’t save any submissions. If you haven’t handled them properly they’re gone for good. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to save every submission for your later review.

Head over to the plugins section of your WordPress backend and download the Flamingo plugin for free. Flamingo is built by the creator of Contact Form 7, so there’s really nothing that you need to do for the set up. It comes ready to go right out of the box.

You will quickly see the benefits of having a central location to review all of your form submissions. This is especially true if you have multiple employees handling quotes and communicating with customers.

My Monthly Management clients have all of their contact form submissions safely stored with Flamingo. To further safeguard your form submissions, make sure that you’re utilizing regular website backups with remote location storage as well.