Nearly every website has a contact page, but does that mean that every website *needs* a contact page? Ultimately, this is a question not about website features, but about business model, marketing goals, etc., and how those things must shape the website design strategy.
Does a website need to have a contact form? That is the question.
However, that question is similar to another question, namely: ‘Does a house need one bathroom or two?’ And the answer is: ‘…Well, why might the homeowners need—or not need—a second bathroom?’
Whether or not a website needs a contact page depends on how the website serves the organization based on factors like business model, marketing goals, etc., and how a contact page might serve those greater purposes. It may be that the organization doesn’t serve their target customer (properly speaking) by phone, email, or in-person visits, in which case they probably don’t need a contact page at all. Or, for instance, if the main goal of the website is to sell a product or to capture appointment signups, then they may not need a contact page, but rather an online shop, or an appointment-scheduling feature.
However, many local businesses and organizations are obviously going to have brick-and-mortars and will serve their customers on location. Some of those—such as chiropractors—will often have customer-service people at a front desk, taking phone calls and serving customers directly in all kinds of ways. In those cases, it might be sufficient for the business to have a contact page that provides simple contact information without a contact form. Or, of course, if for some reason customers need to be able to send messages or make generic inquiries on things aren’t addressed elsewhere on the website, a contact page with a contact form will probably be necessary.
Contact Pages & Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
It’s worth mentioning that a contact page is not an SEO essential for a website, and that is because good on-page SEO is the cumulative result of doing a whole bunch of little things well, correctly, and consistently. One or more of those little things may or may not be present on a website, yet the overall SEO strength of the website can still be very good. For instance, a website may be text-based and have no images, in which case it would have no HTML alt-text tags. While alt text is very helpful for SEO (and should really be considered an SEO requirement if a website has images), a website can easily have very strong on-site SEO without any images at all.
The Bottom Line on Contact Pages
A contact page—and what information is provided and collected on that contact page—is entirely dependent on two, basic factors, namely: 1) your business model, marketing goals, and the like, and how the website serves those; and 2) how a contact page factors into that.
So, does our website need a contact page? Well, how does our website serve our target customers in light of our business model and organizational goals? If we can answer the latter question, the issue of whether or not we need a contact page takes care itself.
Need a Good Contact Form Solution?
If you’re looking for a great contact form for WordPress websites, we can’t recommend Avada enough. After nearly 10 years developing WP websites, we’ve used all the major themes and frameworks, and Avada is the absolute best, hands-down——which is why we’ve used it exclusively since 2015. You can build any website you can imagine with Avada, plus it has an awesome, exhaustive, fully-customizable, native contact-form feature built right into it.
Do your business a favor and get Avada today, and solve your contact form problems once and for all.
