If you have a blog, chances are you want to hear back from your readers. I have tested 14 contact form plugins and 3 form creators for Wordpress. The focus of my tests are how well do they perform, how much overhead to they add and how much memory do they use.
The tested plugins:
- cForms II (v11.0)
- Clean-Contact (v1.2)
- Contact Form 7 (v2.0.5)
- Contact Form 8f (v1.0.0)
- Contact Form with Captcha (v1.00)
- Cool Contact Form (v1.00)
- Easy Contact (v0.1.2b)
- Fast and Secure Contact Form (v1.7.4)
- MM Forms (v0.9.4b)
- Quick Contact (v0.5.1b)
- Simple Contact Form (v3.0)
- SimpleModal Contact Form (v1.2.4)
- Tiny Contact Form (v0.5.1)
- WP-ContactForm (v1.5.1.1)
- WP Contact Form III (v1.6.2d)
- WP Form Creator (v0.9.8)
- Zero Conf Mail (v0.0.3)
I first wanted to check if the plugins added any overhead to my site just by being activated. The results are in the following table.
| Plugin | Requests | Data | Memory | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| None | 6 | 27kb | 10.68mb | Baseline |
| cFormsII | 9 | 55kb | na* | Tested this plugin a bit after the others, and in the meantime the baseline had changed. That's why there are no memory test. |
| Clean-Contact | 6 | 27kb | 10.73mb | |
| Contact Form 7 | 10 | 96kb | 11.41mb | |
| Contact Form 8 | 10 | 96kb | 11.38mb | |
| Contact Form with Captcha | 8 | 29kb | 10.7mb | |
| Cool Contact Form | 8 | 28kb | 10.7mb | |
| Easy Contact | 6 | 27kb | 10.8mb | |
| Fast and Secure Contact Form | 6 | 27kb | 11.18mb | |
| MM Forms | 12 | 117kb | 11.11mb | Forms Creator |
| Quick Contact | 7 | 36kb | 10.77mb | |
| Simple Contact Form | 6 | 27kb | 10.74mb | |
| SimpleModal Contact Form | 15 | 113kb | 10.76mb | |
| Tiny Contact Form | 6 | 27kb | 10.8mb | |
| WP-ContactForm | 6 | 27kb | 10.74mb | |
| WP Contact Form III | 7 | 28kb | 10.75mb | |
| WP Form Creator | 22 | 83kb | 10.77mb | Forms Creator |
| Zero Conf Mail | 6 | 27kb | 10.74mb |
As you can see, quite a few of them does. So even if you never use any contact forms on your site, they are still taking up your resources! So far, the nice ones are Clean-Contact, Easy Contact, Fast and Secure Contact Form, Simple Contact Form, Tiny Contact Form, WP-ContactForm and Zero Conf Mail.
I then used each plugin in turn to add a contact form in a post, and checked again for overhead.
| Plugin | Requests | Data | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| None | 6 | 27kb | Baseline |
| cForms II | 10 | 57kb | Default settings, default form |
| Clean-Contact | 6 | 27kb | Getting parse error when trying to access the admin menu |
| Contact Form 7 | 11 | 98kb | |
| Contact Form 8 | 11 | 98kb | |
| Contact Form with Captcha | 10 | 33kb | Had a hard time getting this to show any form at all, but got it in the end. |
| Cool Contact Form | 8 | 29kb | Looks like the above plugin without the captcha |
| Easy Contact | 6 | 29kb | Default settings |
| Fast and Secure Contact Form | 9 | 35kb | Default settings |
| MM Forms | 13 | 120kb | Used predefined contact form |
| Quick Contact | 8 | 39kb | |
| Simple Contact Form | 9 | 31kb | Widget only (NB! Add in settings screen) |
| SimpleModal Contact Form | 17 | 122kb | Default settings |
| Tiny Contact Form | 6 | 28kb | Do not come with any default styling |
| WP-ContactForm | 6 | 29kb | |
| WP Contact Form III | 7 | 29kb | Insufficient permissions to access settings page (?) |
| WP Form Creator | na | na | Beta. Couldn't get it to work |
| Zero Conf Mail | 6 | 28kb | Default settings |
Conclusions
Given these results, I would say that the first prize for the contact form plugin that adds the least amount of overhead to your wordpress blog goes to
- Easy Contact
- Tiny Contact Form
- WP-ContactForm
- Zero Conf Mail
Congratulations! But there were others close behind as you can see for yourself from the tables.
Perhaps it’s abit unfair for the 3 form creaters tested, as these can be used to create any number of other kinds of forms as well. I guess I will have to give cFormsII a prize as well, as it used the least system resources of the three (though I didn’t have a change to test WP Form Creator, given it’s beta status)
Sigh. I need to re-type everything because I need cookies + JS to comment.
Thanks for the review! The plugin was just released two days ago and I did a major rewrite, you might want to update your tests. The english plugin page is at http://www.nkuttler.de/wordpress/zero-conf-mail/ , I think I put the german link in the initial release’s description.
Thanks!
Hi, I’ll update the link, and run the Zero Conf Mail through the tests again today to check the new version.
Sorry about the cookies+js situation though!
I have tested with the new version of Zero Conf Mail now (v0.1.3) and the numbers are the same as the “old” version that I used in my tests.
So, still a winner
Excellent, thank you!
Thanks so much for taking the time to do this! Perfect.