Add a Contact Form to Your Existing Website

Published 2026-09-28

Say you build custom furniture in a small shop in Portland, Oregon. Your website has been up for years: photos of past tables and bookcases, a short story about the shop, and a Contact page that says "Email us" with your address as a link. It mostly works. But people tap the link on their phone, a mail app they never use opens, and they give up. The ones who do write send "How much for a table?" with no size, wood or timeline, and it takes three emails to get to a quote. Meanwhile, the address on the page collects more spam every month.

You do not need a new website to fix this. This guide shows how to keep your site exactly as it is and send enquiries to a FormEdge contact form instead. On your site, the only change is where the Contact link points (or one new link, if you do not have one yet). The example is a fictional shop, Cedar & Pine Woodworks.

Building and publishing the form, email notifications and the auto-reply to the sender are all available on the Free plan.

When it's time to replace your contact form

• Your Contact button is just an email link. It depends on the visitor having a mail app set up, you get vague first messages, and the published address attracts spam
• Your old form is unreliable. Messages stopped reaching you at some point and nobody noticed, the form is full of bot submissions, or nobody remembers how it was set up
• You need more than a message. You want a deposit or a class fee paid with the request, or you want to stop taking requests after a date or a set number

How it works

1. Build a contact form in FormEdge and publish it. It gets its own web address
2. On your website, point the Contact link, button or footer link at that address
3. Send yourself a test and check it arrives

Because the change on your side is a single link, it works the same whether your site was made with WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, hand-written HTML or by an AI. There is no code to paste into your site.

Walkthrough

1. Build the contact form

   Sign up for FormEdge for free and create a new form from the dashboard. There are two ways to start:

   • Easy AI form generation: describe the form in a sentence or two and AI drafts the fields
   • Blank form: add the fields one at a time yourself

   For the woodworking shop, the description might be:

   Example description

   Copy

   Contact form for a custom furniture workshop. Name, email, phone (optional), what can we help with (one of: custom piece, repair or refinishing, visit the workshop, something else), a box to tell us about the piece they have in mind, and a rough timeline (optional).

   Check the draft, create the form, and adjust the wording of any field in the form editor.

   While you are in the form, open Confirmation email and write the auto-reply that goes to whoever submits. Something like "Thanks for reaching out. We reply to every enquiry within two business days. If you have photos of your space or a piece you like, just reply to this email." sets expectations and saves you a follow-up.

2. Or ask ChatGPT or Claude to build it in chat

   If your FormEdge workspace is connected to ChatGPT or Claude over MCP, you can have the AI build and publish the form in chat. The connection is covered in steps 2 and 3 of How to Build a Website with ChatGPT and How to Build a Website with Claude.

   Prompt to paste

   Copy

   Create a contact form in FormEdge for my furniture shop, Cedar & Pine Woodworks.
   
   Fields:
   - Name
   - Email
   - Phone (optional)
   - What can we help with? (pick one: Custom piece / Repair or refinishing / Visit the workshop / Something else)
   - Tell us about the piece you have in mind (multi-line)
   - Rough timeline (optional)
   
   After someone submits, show: "Thanks! We'll get back to you within two business days."
   
   I'll link to this form from the Contact page of my existing website. Show me the fields first, then publish it and give me the public URL.

   Forms created by an AI come with an email notification to the workspace owner's address already set up.

3. Publish the form and copy its URL

   Publish the form from the form editor. The public URL appears with a copy button. It looks like https://your-workspace.formedge.app/forms/….

   Open it on your computer and on your phone before you link to it. The form is a separate page from your website, so put your shop's name in the form's title or description; visitors should know they are still talking to you.

   You can open the example form built from this guide. Cedar & Pine Woodworks is a fictional business.

4. Point your Contact link at the form

   Open your site's editor and find every link that leads to your inbox. They tend to be in more places than you remember:

   • The Contact item in the main menu
   • Buttons in the page body, like "Request a quote" or "Start a project"
   • The footer, which often has the email link on every page
   • The end of pages like Pricing or About

   Change each link's destination to the form's public URL. An email link (the kind that opens a mail app) is changed the same way: its destination becomes the form's URL instead of your address.

   If your site has no contact link at all, add one: a Contact item in the menu or footer, and ideally a button at the end of your main pages so people who have scrolled to the bottom can act right away.

5. Send a test

   Go to your live website, click Contact, and send a message through the form. Then check three things:

   • The message appears in the FormEdge dashboard
   • The notification email reached you (check your spam folder the first time)
   • The auto-reply reached the email address you entered

   To test only the notification email, use the test send on the Submission notifications page. Test sends do not show up among your submissions.

Tidy up after the switch

• Give people a way back. The message shown after someone submits can include a link. Add "Back to Cedar & Pine Woodworks" pointing to your homepage (it opens in a new tab)
• Retire the old form. Once your test has come through, turn the old form off. If its page stays up for a while, put a link to the new form on it
• Spam protection is already on. Every published form checks for bots on every plan, without making visitors pick out traffic lights in photos

Where to go from here

• Set a window or a limit. Under Acceptance settings, choose when the form opens and closes and how many submissions it takes before it closes itself. Useful for a weekend workshop or a limited run of cutting boards before the holidays
• Get notified in Slack. Send submission notifications to Slack as well as email
• Use your own domain. Publish the form on your own domain, so the address matches your website. You choose the domain for each form
• Show more than the form. If you want pricing, photos of past work or directions on the same page as the form, build a FormEdge page and place the form on it. You get a richer form page, and your website links to that page instead. Build a one-page website with a form from a template walks through it

• Take a deposit with the request. The form can ask for a card payment right after submission, for a fixed amount times a quantity: a design deposit, or a seat in a woodworking class. Receiving payments requires connecting Stripe