If you are familiar with static websites, you will know that forms are a problem—they simply don’t work, or at least not in the traditional way.
People running static sites often don’t offer a contact form or use an external form provider like FormSpree, Tally, or Hubspot.
Forms in Simply Static Pro
We offer a pretty extensive forms integration inside of Simply Static Pro.
It provides two mechanisms: sending the response to an external webhook or embedding the form via an iframe.
It’s compatible with all the major form plugins, such as Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, WP Forms, WS Form, and FluentForms. We even integrated the form widgets from Elementor and Bricks (including Bricks Forge).
It’s also an extensive part of our documentation. We even recorded videos for each integrated form plugin.
Here is a quick example of how to use Contact Form 7 with a webhook:
However, it has one downside: you either have to use an iframe or an external service like Zapier to leverage our forms integration.
Forms in Simply Static Studio
With Studio, we combine the best of both worlds: our existing forms integration in Simply Static Pro and a Rest API integration to receive and store form submissions in your WordPress website.
Smart Defaults
Once you create a new forms configuration in Simply Static, we automatically prefill the webhook data for you:
Secure Requests
To verify that a form submission is coming from a valid source (your static website), we use a randomly generated secret, which must be passed in the request’s header arguments.
This secret is unique to each WordPress website created with Studio and stored as a constant in your wp-config.php.
Form Entries
Each submission is stored in a custom database table of your WordPress website, and we don’t have access to them (GPDR/CCPA-friendly).
E-Mails
Emails are disabled by default on all our WordPress instances.
You will still receive a notification once a new form entry is waiting for you, including a link to access it.
We are firing a webhook request to our internal API to receive the content and send the e-mail.
These emails are never stored on our system – the data only exists temporarily until the email is delivered.
Different Recipient?
If you are an agency or freelancer, you might want to change the recipient for these e-mails, and we’ve got you covered. Websites running on Studio have an additional field inside the forms configuration to add an alternative e-mail:
SMTP
There might be a case where you want to use your own SMTP server for several reasons.
Maybe you would like to use a custom email address for the notification email or send a confirmation email to the visitor who has submitted the form. Guess what? We support that as well.
Install and configure your favorite SMTP plugin; we will automatically use it instead of our API.
We already have a confirmation e-mail solution included, which will be activated once SMTP is configured.
Future considerations
We can do so much with the forms integration, but we decided to keep it simple for now.
However, there are plans to help you even more with things like:
- auto-inserting Google ReCaptcha/hCAPTCHA
- Improving spam detection by using APIs like Akismet
- Automating the form ID detection
Most of these will be included in the product (either in Pro or only in Studio), so stay tuned!
