Contact Form Without Using Plugins

Sure, but there’s a lot of work involved. You have to put up the form, get the responses, sanitize and validate them, then mail out and/or save the response. It’s a whole lot easier to use a plugin for that. (My preference is Formidable.) There’s nothing wrong with using plugins.

If you want to go the “roll your own” route, check this tutorial:
https://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/how-to-build-your-own-wordpress-contact-form-and-why/

You could write a page template and select it for that page, but when you change themes it would be gone. Using a supported plugin is really the best way, because the plugin author codes it for you, and updates when needed.

Thanks Steven
But is it really a good practice to use a lot of plugins especially when using cheap shared hosting. I don’t have much traffic but most blogs out there says that I should not use a lot of plugins. Right now I have almost 10 plugins installed on my blog.

It’s not that there are many plugins, it’s that there are plugins that are inefficient or badly coded(security issues). Ten is a very small number of plugins.
If you write the code to do it, it’s as if you wrote another plugin, so what’s the difference?

I have some sites that use 5 plugins, others 30. It depends on the needed functionality. Also, I have to ask myself — is my time better spent building something or using what’s easily available. Am I better at hooking into spam filters, managing security, the intricacies of ajax, and all that goes into a good user experience than the folks who made the plugin? Sometimes, yes. Usually, no.

Thanks guys. I think i get the picture now.