Why Vanilla Websites Prefers PHP Mailers Over Contact Form Plugins

At Vanilla Websites, we've made the switch to PHP mailers for our WordPress sites. Here’s why we believe it’s the better choice:

1. Seamless Customization

Customizing forms with plugins like Contact Form 7 or WPForms can be a tedious process. These plugins come with preloaded stylesheets that often clash with your site’s design, making it challenging to maintain a cohesive look. By developing a PHP mailer, you can create beautifully designed forms without the limitations and awkward workarounds of a clunky form builder.

2. Enhanced Page Speed

Contact form plugins can significantly impact your site's performance. They add extra CSS and JavaScript, which increase page load times. Although you can use functions to load plugins only on specific pages, this solution falls short if you need contact forms on multiple pages. The additional load will still slow down the designated contact form pages, affecting user experience and SEO.

3. Reduced Spam with Better Performance

Integrating Google ReCAPTCHA with plugins like Contact Form 7 helps reduce spam but adds further performance issues. Google's JavaScript and CSS load across all your pages, affecting your site's speed.

4. Our Solution

At Vanilla Websites, we use a bespoke PHP mailer combined with SMTP for email delivery, reducing the chances of messages being flagged as spam. We also implement a honeypot to capture bots and Akismet for content spam checks. This setup ensures robust spam protection without adding any strain on your page load, as it doesn’t require extra CSS or JavaScript.

Conclusion: The PHP Mailer Advantage

Once you've developed a PHP mailer, you can reuse it across all your websites. This approach eliminates the need for complicated CSS or JavaScript workarounds, ensuring your forms work seamlessly with your site’s design.

For a deeper dive into the benefits of using PHP mailers over plugins, check out these resources:

How to Send Emails Using PHP Mailer: https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/php-mail

Optimizing WordPress Performance: https://kinsta.com/blog/wordpress-performance/

Enhancing Security with SMTP and Honeypot: https://www.godaddy.com/garage/honeypot-technique-stop-spam-bots-contact-form/

At Vanilla Websites, we’re committed to delivering fast, beautiful, and secure websites, and our switch to PHP mailers is just one of the ways we achieve this goal.

PS:- yes, we are still using Contact Form 7 on our own website because we are too busy looking after our client's website haha!

Why Vanilla Websites Prefers PHP Mailers Over Contact Form Plugins At Vanilla Websites, we’ve made the switch to PHP mailers […]