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Setup Contact Forms for WordPress on Google Cloud

Leron Amin 51 Comments

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Are you frustrated trying to get your WordPress website’s contact forms to work on Google Cloud Platform? You’re not alone.

In this tutorial you will learn how to properly setup WordPress contact forms on Google Cloud Platform.

Before starting this tutorial, you should have already launched WordPress on Google Cloud Platform. You should also create a separate Google/Gmail account to handle all of your contact form emails.

There are 6 steps in this tutorial:

1. Download Plugins

Setup Contact Forms in WordPress on Google Cloud
The first step is to install and activate the WP-Mail-SMTP plugin. This plugin will be used to re-configure your mail settings.
Setup Contact Forms in WordPress on Google Cloud
The other plugin you will need to install and activate is Contact Form 7. This plugin will be used to create contact forms.

2. Edit Contact Form Settings

Setup Contact Forms in WordPress on Google Cloud
After installing and activating the Contact Form 7 plugin, you will notice a Contact icon appear on the left-hand side of your WordPress dashboard. Click this icon, then click on Contact form 1.
Setup Contact Forms in WordPress on Google Cloud
Now that you’ve opened Contact Form 1, navigate to the Mail tab, and change the To field to the Gmail address where you want the contact form submissions to be sent.

3. Edit Email SMTP Settings

Setup Contact Forms in WordPress on Google Cloud
Next, navigate to Settings > Email. At the top of the page under the Advanced Email Options section, change the From Email field to match the same Gmail address that you used in the last step. Change the From Name field to whatever you want. Change all of the other settings in this section to match the settings in the picture. After making these changes, click the Save button.
Setup Contact Forms in WordPress on Google Cloud
Next, scroll down the page to the SMTP Options sections. Enter the email address and password for the Gmail account that you entered in the previous steps. Change all of the other settings in this section to match the settings in the picture. After making these changes, click the Save button.

4. Allow Less Secure Apps

As a security precaution, Google blocks account activity from apps that don’t use up-to-date security standards. For this reason, you will need to bypass this feature and tell Google to allow Less secure apps to access your Google/Gmail account.

Setup Contact Forms in WordPress on Google Cloud
To fix this issue, sign in to the Google/Gmail account that you have designated to handle your WordPress contact form emails, then navigate to the Less Secure Apps settings page and click the slider button to allow Less Secure Apps.

5. Publish Contact Form

Setup Contact Forms in WordPress on Google Cloud
Next, go back to the Contact section of you WordPress dashboard. Copy your contact form shortcode.
Setup Contact Forms in WordPress on Google Cloud
Paste the shortcode in a new WordPress post, then visit the post page to test out your contact form.
Setup Contact Forms in WordPress on Google Cloud
Next, send a test contact form to see if it’s working. If it works, great! If not, proceed to the step below.

6. Troubleshoot

If you try to send an email and get an error message, Google may have blocked the SMTP plugin from sending mail from your account.

Setup Contact Forms in WordPress on Google Cloud
To fix SMTP security issues, login to the Google account that you used in setting up this tutorial. Next, head over to Google device activity and choose YES THAT WAS ME to authorize the SMTP application to send email.

Did it Work?

If your contact form is working properly, you will notice a green success message appear after clicking the send button.

If you have any questions or comments, please post them below!

Thanks,

Up Next…

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Comments

  2. Hector says

    Yo ya había probado esto pero no me funcionó con varios intentos ni distintas webs.
    Al parecer no queda de otra que usar el método de API AUTH es mucho más complicado y NO ES UNA SOLUCIÓN DEFINITIVA ya que la API tiene que estar creada en la misma cuenta de gmail con la que se está usando GCP y eso no funciona si se quiere usar para páginas de clientes o páginas que van a llevar otro correo distinto al de GCP.

    UN SIMPLE CORREO LO HAN HECHO UNA CHINGA DE HORAS Y HASTA DE DÍAS.
    Ahí está muy mal GOOGLE.

    Reply

  4. Patel says

    My contact form unable to send mail to my zoho mail address.
    I use apache in google cloud platform.
    What i do about this problem in Apache on gcp.

    Reply

    • Leron Amin says

      Hi Patel,

      Configure the contact form with Gmail – then from within Gmail, change your settings in order to automatically forward the contact from submissions from Gmail to Zoho.

      Hope this helps and let me know if you have questions,
      Joe

  5. Avinash says

    Hello

    Thaks to you GCP WordPress Tutorial I got my website up and running. But stuck now currently i can’t reset my password from “wp-admin” it says “The email could not be sent.
    Possible reason: your host may have disabled the mail() function.”

    and also in wordpress settings general, there is email address field where i can’t see to change it.
    it shows “[email protected]” this but when i put my own email id from which i created wordpress i didn’t receive any mail for confirmation. It says “There is a pending change of the admin email to [email protected].”

    Please Help i’m using WordPress Bitnami.

    Thanks Again for you wonderful tutorial.

    Reply

  6. Kaibron says

    Hi Leron,
    I would like to do email marketing and e-com and I registered on mailchimp, does this tutorial work with or could you tell me which is the tutorial that is close to what I’m looking for?
    Of all the tutorials I’ve looked for, it’s the only one I have not found or I do not have to know what’s the good …

    Reply

  9. Victor says

    Hi Joe! The tutorial worked really good but I would like to know how can I change the following:

    When I receive an email in the gmail account, int the inbox the email say from me.

    In the forms I have I ask for the name of the person and in my previous hosting I could have the forms be sent by the persons name. Now, all the emails I receive say me, me, me, me

    I tried a couple things but couldn’t make it work. Any ideas?

    Reply

    • Leron Amin says

      Hi Victor,

      Were you able to get the issue resolved?

      If you’re using contact form 7, try deleting then recreating the form from a fresh template and see what happens.

    • Victor Garcia says

      Hi Joe!

      YES, my problem was that the sender email and receiver email were the same, and that was causing that the name shown was always me.

      Changed the sender email to wordpress@mydomain. com and worked like a charm

      Thanks again for the tutorial

  10. ansri says

    I could not follow from Step 3, I guess the plugin must have been updated since you posted this tutorials, as all the options have changed. Can you verify.

    Reply

  11. Muhammad Royyan says

    Hello, thank you for your tutorial. I wanna ask you something, is it work if I use custom email from Zoho Mail? I mean i will not use gmail as destination mail address. Sorry for my bad english

    Reply

    • Leron Amin says

      Hi Muhammad,
      Yes you may, however, your SMTP host and port information may be different – so you will have to make the appropriate modifications.
      Regards,
      Joe

  12. Rob McDonald says

    Joe,

    Let me first say that I am relatively new to cloud computing, and if not for your web site, I would not have started with Google Cloud. Your tutorials helped me greatly in learning to set up sites on Google Cloud. This also open me up to other possibilities with the Google Cloud Platform.

    Recently I have had some issues with contact forms and them not sending emails. I use Ninja forms and WP Forms.

    I did a lot of research on this and found my best solution to use a smtp plugin called “Gmail SMTP.” This plugin is a little harder to setup then the one you mention in your article, but I feel that it is better. I tried using the one you mentioned, and others, and could just not get them to work correctly.

    The plugin I mentioned does require you to use your gmail account, go into the Google Cloud console and set up the Gmail API and get OAuth 2.0 credentials.

    It seems that Google maybe trying to get away from people using the “less secure apps” option when setting up SMTP mail, as I was getting errors with my account when trying to use these options.

    The Gmail SMTP plugin works great once you get it setup and there is a great tutorial that shows you how to set it up. I will put the link below this comment so you can decide if you want this link to go through or not. Just though it might be helpful to you and your readers.

    –Rob

    https://wphowto.net/gmail-smtp-plugin-for-wordpress-1341

    Reply

    • Leron Amin says

      Hi Rob,

      I am glad very glad to hear the tutorials on the site have helped you 🙂

      Thanks for taking the time to comment about your experience with configuring contact forms. As you are aware, contact forms don’t work ‘out-of-the-box’ on Google Cloud and for that reason can cause a lot of frustration for GCP users.

      I looked at the tutorial and using the Gmail API is probably a better practice for site security, all things considered.

      Thanks for taking the time to post the link – I am certain that many users will benefit from it! 😀

      Best regards,
      Joe

    • Leron Amin says

      Hi David,

      I am sorry the tutorial didn’t work for you!

      If you get your contact forms working, please let me know what the problem was.

      In the meantime, if you’d like help getting your contact forms working, let me know and I’d be happy to troubleshoot with you.

      Talk to you soon, 🙂
      Joe

  16. ric says

    Does this only work with gmail addresses? For my WP forms, I am trying to use a domain email address that i setup using your zoho tutorial.

    Reply

    • ric says

      Hi,
      so everything works fine. However, in contact form 7 the “reply to field” is the domain email address, but the “from field” address is the same gmail address i used to setup the smtp plugin. Can I change the from field to the domain email address as well or do I have to have the gmail address on the from field for the contact form to work properly.

    • Leron Amin says

      Hi Ric,
      Many people have had issues getting this tutorial to work so I am happy to hear that you got things working!
      The ‘From’ email address has to be the Gmail address that you configured with the SMTP plugin. However, after the email address is forwarded to that Gmail account, you can reply to the mail using your domain email which was the purpose of this tutorial. When it’s configured this way, all of the interactions that you have with customers through your website can be done through your custom domain name email.
      Let me know if this answers your question 🙂
      Talk to you soon,
      Joe

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