How to Create, Embed, and Use a GHL Contact Form in GoHighLevel
If you've been running your business on GoHighLevel for even a few weeks, you already know the contact form is one of those small features that quietly does a lot of heavy lifting. It's usually the first real conversation between a stranger and your business, someone lands on your site, decides you might be worth talking to, and fills in a few fields. What happens after that determines whether they become a client or just another name you forget to follow up with.
The good news is that GHL's form builder handles the whole journey: building the form, styling it to match your brand, putting it on a page, and wiring it into a workflow that actually does something when someone submits it. You don't need Typeform, you don't need a WordPress plugin, and you don't need to pay for a separate form tool. Everything stays inside the CRM you're already paying for.
This guide walks through the full process, from creating a blank form to embedding it on a non-GHL website and setting up the automation that follows a submission. If you're new to building on the platform, it pairs well with our earlier post on creating and launching a website in GoHighLevel, since the form you build here is often the same one that goes on that site.
Why bother with GHL's own form builder
You could technically embed a Google Form or a Typeform on your GHL-hosted page and call it a day. Plenty of people do. But the moment you do that, you lose the one thing GHL is actually good at: connecting a form submission directly to a contact record, a pipeline stage, and a workflow, without any Zapier middleman.
When someone fills out a native GHL form, the contact is created (or updated, if they already exist) instantly. You can tag them, drop them into a pipeline, fire off a WhatsApp or SMS notification to your sales team, or start a nurture sequence, all without leaving the platform. For agencies and business owners in Nigeria managing leads across WhatsApp, email, and phone calls, that single point of entry matters more than it sounds like it should. It's one less place for a lead to fall through the cracks.
Step 1: Create the form
Log into your GHL account (or the correct sub-account, if you're an agency managing this for a client).
In the left sidebar, go to Sites → Forms.
Click + New Form (sometimes labeled + Create New Form, depending on which version of the builder you're on).
Give it a name you'll actually recognize later, "Contact Form – Homepage" is far more useful six months from now than "Form 1."
You'll land in the form builder with a blank canvas or a starter template, depending on whether you picked one. GHL usually pre-populates a generic contact form with First Name, Last Name, Email, and Phone. You can keep that structure or strip it down.
I'd lean toward stripping it down. A shorter form gets more completions, that's not a GHL quirk, it's just how people behave online. Nobody wants to fill in eight fields to ask a question. If you don't need "Company Size" or "How did you hear about us" for a basic contact form, leave it off and capture that detail later, once the person is already a lead.
To add or remove fields:
Hover over an existing field and click the x to remove it.
Click Add Form Element (the plus icon, usually top-left) to bring in a new one, Full Name, Email, Phone, a custom text area for a message, dropdowns, checkboxes, whatever the situation calls for.
Drag fields up or down to reorder them.
Click into any field to rename its label, adjust the placeholder text, or mark it as required.
For a basic Nigerian business contact form, I'd keep it to Full Name, Phone Number, Email, and a short message field. If WhatsApp is your primary follow-up channel, and for a lot of businesses here, it is, make sure the phone field is set up to capture the number cleanly, including the country code, so it's usable later in a WhatsApp automation without someone on your team having to manually reformat every entry.
Step 2: Style the form
Once the fields are in place, click over to the Styles tab. This is where you control:
Background color and border
Font, text color, and button color
Field spacing and corner radius
Whether the form is full width or a fixed width (turn on Full Width if you want it to resize properly on mobile)
Don't overthink this part. Match your brand colors, make sure the submit button stands out, and preview it on a phone-sized screen before you move on. Most of your traffic, especially if you're targeting a Nigerian audience, is coming in on mobile data, so a form that looks fine on a laptop but breaks on a small screen is a real problem, not a cosmetic one.
Step 3: Set up what happens after submission
Under the Settings tab (sometimes called Options), decide what a visitor sees the moment they hit submit. You've got two main choices:
Show a Thank You message — a custom line of text confirming you got their details. Something like "Thanks, we'll reach out within the hour" works better than a generic "Submission received."
Redirect to another page — send them to a dedicated thank-you page, or straight to a WhatsApp link so they can message you directly while they're still thinking about it.
This same panel is also where you connect the form to a workflow, which is really the point of all this. Without it, a form submission just sits in a list somewhere and someone has to remember to check it.
Step 4: Connect the form to a workflow
This is the step people skip and then wonder why leads go cold. A form without an automation behind it is just a fancier version of an email inbox nobody checks.
In Automation → Workflows, create a new workflow (or open an existing one).
Set the trigger to Form Submitted, and select the specific form you just built.
Add whatever actions make sense for your business. Common ones:
Add Contact Tag — tag the contact with something like "contact-form-website" so you can track where leads are coming from later.
Send Notification — alert yourself or your sales team by email, SMS, or internal notification the moment someone submits.
Send WhatsApp Message — if you've got WhatsApp connected, this is where a Nigerian business really benefits. A near-instant WhatsApp reply to a new lead does more for conversion than almost anything else on this list.
Add to Pipeline — move the contact straight into your sales pipeline at the appropriate stage.
Under the workflow's settings, turn on Allow Re-entry if you want returning contacts to trigger the workflow again later, useful if someone submits the form, goes quiet for months, and then reaches out again. Then flip the toggle from Draft to Publish, and save.
Step 5: Embed the form
How you embed the form depends on where it needs to live.
If it's going on a GHL-built site or funnel: you don't need to embed anything manually. Just drag the Form element onto the page inside the Site or Funnel builder and select the form you created.
If it's going on an external website — WordPress, Wix, Webflow, Shopify, or a custom-built site, you'll need the embed code:
Open the form in the builder and click Integrate (sometimes labeled Integrate Form or just the embed/publish icon).
Choose between the iFrame code and the JavaScript embed code. GHL will generate both.
Copy the code and paste it into your website's HTML.
For WordPress specifically: add a Custom HTML block (in Gutenberg) or a Custom HTML widget to the page or post where the form should appear, paste the code in, and update or publish the page.
A quick word on iFrame versus JavaScript: the JavaScript embed generally loads faster and renders a bit more smoothly on mobile. The iFrame version works fine for most simple use cases, but it has a real limitation worth knowing about — it doesn't reliably pass through URL parameters, which matters if you're running paid ads and want to track which campaign a lead came from. If attribution tracking matters to your business (and if you're spending money on Facebook or Google ads, it should), the JavaScript embed is the safer choice.
Once it's live, submit a test entry yourself with obviously fake details, then check that the contact shows up correctly in GHL and that your workflow actually fired.
A note for GHL.ng users
If you're running GHL through GHL.ng, the setup process inside the platform is identical to what's described above, the form builder, workflows, and embed options all work the same way regardless of which reseller or agency account you're accessing GHL through. The main thing to double-check is that your currency and SMS/WhatsApp credit settings are configured correctly on the Nigerian plan before you start sending automated notifications, since that affects whether your follow-up messages actually send.
Common mistakes to avoid
A few things I see trip people up repeatedly:
Forgetting to publish the workflow. The form works fine, submissions come in, but nothing happens after, because the workflow was left in Draft.
Making the form too long. Every extra field is a small tax on your conversion rate. Ask for what you need now, not everything you might want later.
Not testing on mobile. A form that looks great on a desktop preview can be a mess on a phone. Always check both.
Skipping the redirect or thank-you message. Leaving a visitor staring at a blank screen after they submit makes it feel like the form failed, even when it worked.
Wrapping up
A contact form is a small piece of a much bigger picture, but it's the piece that decides whether interest turns into a conversation. GHL gives you everything you need to build, style, connect, and deploy one without stitching together three or four separate tools. Get the fields right, keep it short, connect it to a workflow that actually follows up, and test it properly before you send traffic to it.
If you're comparing GHL against other platforms before committing to it for your business, our breakdown of GoHighLevel vs HubSpot covers how the two handle forms, automation, and pricing side by side.
FAQs
1. Can I use a GHL contact form on a website that isn't built in GoHighLevel? Yes. Build the form inside GHL, generate either the iFrame or JavaScript embed code from the Integrate option, and paste it into your WordPress, Wix, Webflow, or custom HTML site. Submissions still flow directly into your GHL CRM.
2. What's the difference between the iFrame and JavaScript embed options? Both display the form, but the JavaScript embed generally loads faster and passes through URL parameters more reliably, which matters for ad tracking and attribution. The iFrame is simpler but has known limitations with tracking data on external sites.
3. Why isn't my form triggering a workflow after submission? The most common cause is a workflow left in Draft mode. Open the workflow connected to your form, confirm the trigger is set to "Form Submitted" with the correct form selected, and make sure it's toggled to Publish.
4. Can I send a WhatsApp notification when someone fills out my contact form? Yes, as long as WhatsApp is connected to your GHL account. Add a "Send WhatsApp Message" action to the workflow attached to your form, and it will fire automatically on submission.
5. How many fields should a contact form have? Keep it as short as the information you actually need right now. For most businesses, Full Name, Phone Number, Email, and a short message field is enough to start a conversation. You can always collect more details later once the lead is in your pipeline.
