Photo by Christopher Gower on Unsplash
The absolute easiest way to setup up forms on your static websites
This tutorial uses Form Submit
I don't know if you've ever looked for HTML form tutorials before but it seems like they all do a great job of explaining how to create & style them but barely any of them show you how to give them functionality. Form Submit makes this really easy. You can get emails sent to any email address you want without all the hassle of setting up a backend for a simple static website.
Pros:
- It's completely free
- Super fast & easy
- No backend necessary
- Don't have to put your email address on the Internet
Cons:
- Has 3rd party branding (you can remove this but don't get reCaptcha as a result)
So let's begin.
We'll write the HTML first.
<form action="https://formsubmit.co/your@email.com" method="POST">
<input type="text" name="name" required>
<input type="email" name="email" required>
<button type="submit">Send</button>
</form>
Make sure you add a name
attribute to each form element in order to receive the submission data.
Submit the form, Form Submit will then send you an email and that will give you a code to replace your email with in the action
attribute so you won't have bots grabbing your email.
Then you're done! It's that simple.
If you want to do things such as add a thank you page, reply to their email, or remove Google reCaptcha you can find that on their documentation and it's just as surprisingly simple as the rest of it.
Hope someone else tries this for themselves, I really like it as a simple solution for my static websites.
Cheers!