This time I decided to check out the different contact forms plugins for WordPress. Some of them are just simple contact forms where you have no options for customization, and others lets you build your own forms from scratch.
The plugins where you could build your own forms all came with a default form, with the exception of FormBuilder. Before I could test this plugin I created a simple contact me form. cformsII lets you turn on/off ajax feature on the forms, but I couldn’t detect any difference in loadtime either way.
The tests where all done on a fresh install of WordPress, using Firefox and Firebug.
The plugins I decided to test are:
- WP_ContactMe 1.0.1 by DCoda Ltf
- WP-ContactForm 1.5 by Ryan Duff and Peter Westwood
- SimpleModal Contact Form (SMCF) 1.1.3 by Eric Martin
- FormBuilder 0.57 by TruthMedia Internet Group
- Contact Form 7 1.7.7 by Takayuki Miyoshi
- cformsII 8.4 by Oliver Seidel
| Plugin | WP_CM | WP-CF | SMCF | FormBuilder | Contact Form 7 | cformsII |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| JS | No | No | jquery | prototype | Yes, 3 | Yes |
| Custom forms | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Insert method | ||||||
| Avg. loadtime | 1.24s | 1.34s | 2.39s | 2.8s | 3.17s | 2.65s |
Note! The SimpleModal Contact Form (SMCF) required me change my theme, so I decided to drop it from the test, as all others are “Plug-and-play”.
UPDATE! After checking the installation instructions for SMCF it seems you can indeed insert this form without altering any themes. You just have to create a post or a page, and enter a link with a certain class. This link will then open the contact form. The average loadtime of SMCF can therefor be a bit inaccurate since it was taken on different day than the rest. But as you can see, it is the fastest of the javascript-using plugins 
Conclusion
If you just want a simple form for your readers to contact you, you are better off with either WP_ContactMe or WP-ContactForm. But if you want to be able to customize your own forms, cformsII is the “fastest” of them.
