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How to add a contact form with Eleventy (11ty)

FormBackend is a service that makes it easy to collect submissions from your HTML forms. This makes us an ideal companion when it comes to static site generators.

In this post we’ll take a look at how to add a contact form to a Eleventy static site.

First create your form backend

Log in to your FormBackend account and visit the forms index page. Go ahead and create a new form and give it a name you can remember it by.

After your form has been created, you’ll see the “Submissions” page which is where new submissions will appear. If you navigate to the “Set up” page you can see the unique URL for your form. We’ll copy that!

Create a new Eleventy site

Eleventy is really simple, it takes any file that matches the known extensions and outputs them as .html.

So let’s create a contact.html file in root with the following HTML:

<h1>Contact us</h1>

<form action="https://www.formbackend.com/f/{your-identifier}" method="POST">
  <div class="fieldset">
    <label for="name">Name</label>
    <input type="text" id="name" name="name" required>
  </div>

  <div class="fieldset">
    <label for="email">Email</label>
    <input type="email" id="email" name="email" required>
  </div>

  <div class="fieldset">
    <label for="message">Message</label>
    <textarea id="email" name="email" required></textarea>
  </div>

  <button type="submit">Submit</button>
</form>

Notice the action attribute on the form element. We’ll take the unique URL we copied from FormBackend and paste that in there. This example form has three fields; name, email and message. But your form can have as many or few as you want. All they need is a unique name attribute, which is how we store the data when it hits our servers.

If you run

npx @11ty/eleventy

It’ll install Eleventy and generate the files. In order to start the server you run

npx @11ty/eleventy --serve

You can now visit http://localhost:8080/contact/ which will load the file that was generated from your contact.html file that we just edited.

It’ll look like this

Visiting the Eleventy development server URL in your browser

We can make that look a little better by adding some CSS. Go ahead and add the following <style>-tag after the form at the bottom of the contact.html file.

<style>
  body { font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; }

  .fieldset + .fieldset,
  form + form {
    margin-top: 8px;
  }

  label {
    color: #334155;
    display: block;
    font-size: 87.5%;
    font-weight: bold;
    text-transform: uppercase;
  }

  input,
  textarea,
  select {
    border: 1px solid #ddd;
    color: #475569;
    font-size: 100%;
    padding: 5px;
    border-radius: 4px;
  }

  button[ type="submit"] {
    background: purple;
    background: #14b8a6;
    border: none;
    box-shadow: none;
    color: white;
    border-radius: 2px;
    font-size: .8rem;
    text-transform: uppercase;
    font-weight: 500;
    padding: 8px 12px;
    margin-top: 16px;
  }
</style>

You should now see this if you reload the page:

The Eleventy contact form styled with CSS

After filling out the form and hitting the submit button, you’ll be taken to FormBackend’s submission success page and if you navigate to the Submissions page for the form you just created earlier in FormBackend you should see the data you just submitted.

Handling submissions with JavaScript

Since Eleventy outputs static HTML, the form above redirects to FormBackend’s default thank-you page. If you want to submit without a page refresh, you can add a small <script> block to your template that uses fetch to POST to FormBackend’s AJAX endpoint and show a success message inline. This pairs well with Eleventy’s approach of keeping things simple and close to vanilla HTML.

What to configure next

Your Eleventy contact form is collecting submissions. Here’s what to set up in FormBackend:

Guides for other static site generators: Hugo, Jekyll, Gatsby, Astro, and more.