Fastest WordPress Form Builder 2021

WordPress doesn't come with a built-in form builder. And most form builders slow down your site. So, the fastest WordPress form builder is a must for a super-fast site speed. So, if you need to create contact forms for your WordPress website that doesn’t slow your site down, this article is for you.

WP Fluent Forms is the best plugin for building fastest loading contact forms for your WordPress website. It is very lightweight, provides a drag and drop experience, and loads its assets only to those pages where you use forms. These features make it a better choice over Contact Form 7, which is the fastest loading form builder plugin for WordPress while WP Fluent Forms being the second.

Why Choose WP Fluent Forms?

There are lots of plugins that you can use to build beautiful forms for your WordPress site. They also make it very easy to build forms with various input fields like Name, Email, Text, Number, and so on. WP Fluent Forms is no different and it does these things very well. However, the most amazing feature of WP Fluent Forms is that it is built for speed and it doesn’t sacrifice any features in the process of making it load fast. That’s why it is a great choice for anyone looking to build forms on his WordPress site. Take a look at the factors described below that makes WP Fluent Forms stand out among the rest.

Ease of Use

WP Fluent Forms has a great user interface that gives you a drag and drop form building experience so you don’t need to have any coding skills. You can add various input fields that allow your visitors to enter their Name, Email, Address, and so on. Then you can customize these fields to your liking by changing their title or hiding the title completely, adding placeholder text, and so on. You can also add columns to your forms then use different input fields inside the columns. After you create a form you can just use the form’s shortcode to load the form anywhere on your WordPress site.

Stores Form Data

After you deploy your form on your website and people start to fill up the forms, you would want to have the form submission information stored on your WordPress site and maybe send the information to your email address. WP Fluent Forms does all these by default therefore you don’t need to use any additional plugins to store your forms records. Therefore, you need not to concern about losing your form submission data just because you forgot to set up an additional plugin.

Fast Loading Speed

WP Fluent Forms is one of the fastest loading form builder plugins for WordPress. This is because it only needs a few kilobytes of assets to load forms on your website. Generally, it requires just 14KB of CSS file and 18KB of JS file totaling only 32KB to load forms on your website. Where most form builder plugins load hundreds of kilobytes or sometimes even a few megabytes of assets making your site load slow. Also, WP Fluent Forms assets are only loaded on the pages where you use forms. Therefore, the page speed of all the pages without any forms don’t get affected by the plugin.

Cost

WP Fluent Forms has a free version that provides you with almost all the features you will need to create the most common types of contact forms. But it also offers additional features that require you to upgrade to their pro version. For instance, if you want to use Phone Number field to your site, you will need to upgrade to their premium version. Speaking of which, you can use Numeric Field or Mask Input field in the free version to let people enter their phone numbers as long as you don’t need them to be able to select their country when entering their phone number. Still, if you need to upgrade to its pro plan, it will start at $59 for 1 year license of a single website and go up to $599 for lifetime license of unlimited websites.

You can check out the article to know about the fastest page builder for WordPress.

What about Contact Form 7 Plugin?

Contact Form 7 requires the least amount of assets to load forms on your website. It loads about 14KB of CSS and 2KB of JS adding just 16KB to your webpage’s size. Even though it loads the least amount of assets on your WordPress site, I don’t recommend using this because of the following reasons:

Not a Drag and Drop Builder

Building forms on Contact Form 7 isn’t as easy as most other form builder plugins on WordPress. That’s because it doesn’t provide you with a drag and drop form building experience. You can add different input fields and customize various options in it but it isn’t’ very intuitive and the fields are always shown in text format in the form editing area. Therefore, you need to deal with codes every time you want to create a form or modify an existing one.

Loads Assets to All the Webpages

If you use Contact Form 7 on your website, it will load its assets to all the pages on your website. Therefore, it will load its assets to pages where you didn’t even use any forms which will affect your page load time in these pages as well. Because of this reason, even though Contact Form 7 is the most lightweight form builder plugin, I don’t consider it to be a good choice if you focus on website speed.

Doesn’t Store From Data

It also doesn’t come with the functionality to store your form submission data. Therefore, you will need to use another plugin in order to store your form submission entries. That’s why there is a chance that you lose all your form data because you didn’t know you needed an additional plugin or you forgot to use one.

What Are Other Alternatives?

There are a lot of form builder plugins for you to choose from. As long your main concerns are a good form building experience with all the necessary features and fast website speed, you can check out the following plugins:

WP Forms

WP forms is among one of the most used contact form builder plugins for WordPress. It has over 3 million active installations and it has been downloaded over 43 million times. It also has 5 star reviews by over 6,000 people and a few hundred reviews ranging from 1 to 4 stars.

It provides a drag and drop form building experience that works very nicely and you can get used to it very easily. It also has many input fields that you can add to your forms to collect different types of information from your website visitors.

It requires about 37KB of CSS and 75KB of JS to load forms on your website. And, unlike Contact Form 7, it loads these assets only to the pages where you use forms.

However, WP Forms is a freemium plugin and even though you will find most of the necessary functionalities in its free version, it doesn’t store your form submission data in its free version. So you will either need to use a third-party plugin for doing that or upgrade to its pro version to use all its features.

Ninja Forms

Ninja Forms is also a very popular form builder plugin for WordPress with over 1 million active installations. It has a very easy to use form building interface that will help you while building forms using this plugin.

It adds about 139KB or CSS and 69KB of JS totaling 208KB to your webpage size. But it doesn’t load these assets on the pages where you don’t use forms.

Ninja Forms also is a freemium plugin but you will find the most necessary features in its free version. Additionally, it will store all your form submission entries without requiring you to upgrading to pro or installing a separate plugin.

weForms

If you are looking for a form builder plugin that lets you create forms very fast, you can take a look at weForms. It is not very much about your website load time but about how fast your form building experience is. The interface of weForms is super-fast which makes switching from one tab to another very instant without showing any lag.

It loads about 90KB of CSS and 270KB of JS totaling 360KB of total assets. But it only loads these assets to the pages where you use forms. Additionally, it saves all the form submission entries on your WordPress database without requiring to upgrade to its pro plan or installing any additional plugin.

Other than these alternatives, you can see for Formidable Form, FormCraft, Happy Forms, and Gravity Forms based on your requirements. They all are relatively lightweight and provides you with good form building experience.

Do I Need To Care about Form Loading Speed?

Website load time has been proven to be a very important factor for websites. A fast loading website will help you retain more visitors, do better at search rankings, increase website conversion, and a lot of other things. Therefore, it is always better to focus on having a fast loading website.

Forms are such an element that doesn’t generally make a huge difference in your page load time. It may add few milliseconds to a few hundred milliseconds to your page load time unless your form builder is super bulky and in that case, it may add seconds to your page load time. Though this speed difference may not look so big, small things like this add up and make a site load slow. Therefore, if you want to have an absolutely fast website load time, you should choose a form builder plugin that is lightweight and helps your site load fast.

What Else Should I Care about Other Than Speed?

Speed is one of the important factors that you need to consider while choosing your form builder plugin. But the most important factor is your specific requirements. For instance, if you need a form that can verify the form submitter is a human, you first need to find if a form builder supports this verification system. Then once your specific requirements are met, you need to consider some general factors that are common to most people. Take a look at the below factors that you might need to care about while choosing your form builder plugin.

User-Friendly Interface

It is one of the factors that will make building forms very pleasing. If you form builder gives you an easy form building experience with drag and drop functionality and live preview of how any changes you make affect the look of your form, then you will feel very comfortable using it. This will also help you make forms in very little time.

Tutorials

If you are very new to WordPress or form builder plugins, you need to find if there are enough tutorials and documentation available for a plugin. This will help you in situations where you don’t seem to find out how to do something or if doing that something is possible at all in that plugin.

Form Data Management

You may want to get updates in your email when someone fills up a form on your website. You may also want to store all the form submission data in your WordPress database and be able to export those data so that you can use it in a different application like for marketing. That’s why it is always better to find out earlier if your form builder can do these.

Price

Price is also an important factor while choosing your form builder plugin. It may offer you a free plan with some basic features and ask you to upgrade to its premium plan to use all its features. Therefore, you should be aware of the pricing model and what features are available to which plan before selecting the right form builder plugin for you.

Conclusion:

Even though WordPress, by default, comes with almost everything you need to build a website, forms aren’t one of them. Therefore, you need to use a third-party solution for using forms on your WordPress sites. And when choosing the right form builder plugin, it is important to consider, among other things, how it will affect your website load time.

WP Fluent Forms helps you create forms that load very fast on your WordPress websites. It also provides a very easy to use interface that you can use to build forms without using any codes. Most of the necessary form features are also available in its free version and you only need to upgrade to its pro version if you want advanced features.

These characteristics of WP Fluent Forms has set it apart from the rest of the form builder plugins. And it can be a good choice if you want to have fast loading speed for your website without sacrificing any features from your forms.