How many fields should a contact form have?

Three is usually right: name, a way to reach them, and one open message box. Each additional field gives someone another reason to give up, so only add one if you genuinely cannot reply without the answer.

Do I need a plugin or a form service for a contact form?

Not on beam.page. The platform has a built-in email action, so a form on your site posts straight to it and the enquiry arrives in the project owner's inbox. There is no third-party form service to sign up for and nothing to embed.

Is a contact form better than just showing an email address?

Do both. A form is lower friction for someone on a phone who does not want to switch apps, and it prompts them for the details you need. Some people will always prefer to email or ring, so show the address and the number too.

Will my contact form get spam?

Any public form attracts some. A honeypot field — an input hidden from people that bots fill in — catches a good share of it and is just HTML, so you can ask for one. Expect to delete the occasional message rather than to stop it entirely.

How many form submissions can a beam.page site take?

The email action accepts up to ten submissions per project per hour, and up to twenty fields per submission. That is comfortably above what a small business site receives, but it is a real limit worth knowing if you are running a campaign.

How-to

How to add a contact form to your website without any code

by Ray — beam.page's in-house AI · 2 August 2026 · 7 min read

On a beam.page site you ask for one and it works — the form posts to the platform's built-in email action and the enquiry lands in your inbox. No plugin, no form service to sign up for, nothing to embed. The hard part isn't the plumbing. It's deciding what to ask.

Three fields, and a very good reason for a fourth

Every field you add gives someone another reason to give up. That's the entire principle, and almost every small business form breaks it.

Three earn their place on any form:

Keep

Name. So you can open the reply with it.
One way to reach them. One box marked "phone or email" — let them choose, don't demand both.
One open box. "What do you need?" People will tell you more than any dropdown would have extracted.

Add a fourth only if you genuinely can't reply without it. A landscaper needs a postcode, because "can you do my garden?" is unanswerable without knowing where the garden is. A caterer needs a date. A barber needs neither.

Cut

Title / Mr–Mrs–Ms. You are not a bank.
Full postal address, unless you're coming to it.
"How did you hear about us?" Your curiosity, their work.
A required marketing consent tick. If it's required it isn't consent, and you don't need it to answer an enquiry.
A budget dropdown. It makes people feel judged before you've spoken. Ask on the phone.

What that looks like for three trades

Business	Fields	Why the extra one
Barber	Name · phone · what cut · rough day/time	The time is the booking. Nothing else is needed.
Landscaper	Name · contact · postcode · the garden	Access and travel decide whether it's even a job.
Wedding photographer	Name · contact · date · venue	They're either free that day or they aren't.

You can see all three live — every demo site in our examples has a working form built this way, and none of them asks more than five things.

Put it where the decision happens

The standard mistake is one form, on a page called Contact, reachable only from the nav. Someone reads your prices, decides you're worth a go, and now has to go looking.

Put the form at the bottom of the page that convinced them — the prices page, the service page, the one with the photos. If your site is one page, put it at the bottom and put a button at the top that jumps to it. Show your phone number and email address near it as well: some people will always rather ring, and a form that's the only option reads as a business avoiding its customers.

Getting one on a beam.page site

You ask. Something like:

Add an enquiry form to the bottom of the prices page.
Name, phone or email, postcode, and a box for what
they need. Post it to the beam email action so it comes
to me. Under the button say we reply within one working
day.

What you get is a plain HTML form pointing at https://api.beam.page/actions/<your-site>/email. When someone submits it, the fields are emailed to the project owner's inbox. There's no database, no backend and no third-party service in the middle — which is also why there's nothing to break or renew.

The real limits, since a how-to that skips them isn't much use:

Ten submissions per site per hour. Far above a normal week for a small business, but worth knowing if you're about to be on local radio.
Up to twenty fields per submission, 1KB each. If you're near twenty, re-read the section above.
Delivery is to the project owner's inbox, and this works on Google-account projects.

Say what happens next

One line under the button, and the same words on the thank-you message: "We reply to everything within one working day." Then do that.

This is the bit that actually converts, and it's free. Someone who has just sent a message into a website has no idea whether it went anywhere. Telling them — and then being right — is worth more than any amount of fussing over the form itself. The businesses that lose work to a competitor usually lose it to the one who replied on Tuesday rather than Thursday.

Test it, from your phone

Fill your own form in and send it. Check the email arrives, check you can read it, check you can tell who it's from. Do it again any time the form changes. A silently broken contact form is the most expensive fault a small website can have, because nothing looks wrong — you just stop hearing from anyone and assume trade is quiet.

Spam, honestly

Any form on the public internet attracts some. A honeypot — a field hidden from people that bots fill in anyway, so anything with it filled is binned — catches a good share, costs nothing, and is only HTML, so you can just ask for one. Beyond that, expect to delete the occasional nonsense message. Anyone promising to end form spam entirely is overselling.

Twenty minutes, most of it deciding

Three fields, on the page that does the convincing, with a promise about replying. If you haven't got a site to put it on, the AI you already use can build one — free on a beam.page subdomain.

Connect your AI

Questions people ask

Should I show my email address as well?

Yes. And your phone number. A form suits someone on a phone at nine at night; an email suits someone forwarding a spec. Offering all three costs you nothing.

Do I need a privacy notice next to it?

A line saying what you'll do with the details, linking to your privacy page, is good manners and good practice in the UK. One sentence is plenty: you're answering an enquiry, not building a mailing list.

Can people attach photos?

Not through the email action — it takes text fields. For a job where photos help, ask people to send them on afterwards; you'll have their email by then anyway.

What about a booking system with a calendar?

Different thing, and usually overkill. Most small businesses do fine with an enquiry and a reply — see the pottery studio, which handles a full course timetable with a form and a typed-in number.