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Hugo generates pure static HTML — perfect until the site needs a contact form. A Crunchforms endpoint gives every Hugo site working forms without leaving static hosting.

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Before you start: create your endpoint

Every guide on this page needs a Crunchforms form ID. Getting one takes about two minutes:
  1. Sign up free — 1,000 submissions a month included, no credit card required.
  2. In your dashboard, click New Form, give it a name, and pick a response type: Redirect for classic form posts (the visitor lands on your thank-you page), or JSON if you’ll submit with JavaScript and handle the response yourself.
  3. Your endpoint is https://crunchforms.com/form/{formID} — copy it with the Copy Action URL button, or use the dashboard’s snippet generator.
The quickstart covers this in more detail.

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As a Hugo partial

Create the partial once and reuse it across layouts. Keeping the form ID in your site config makes it easy to swap between test and production forms:
hugo.toml
[params]
  crunchformsId = "{formID}"
layouts/partials/contact-form.html
<form action="https://crunchforms.com/form/{{ .Site.Params.crunchformsId }}" method="post">
  <label for="name">Name</label>
  <input name="name" type="text" id="name" required />

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

  <label for="message">Message</label>
  <textarea name="message" id="message" rows="5" required></textarea>

  <button type="submit">Send message</button>
</form>
Then in any layout or shortcode:
layouts/contact/single.html
{{ partial "contact-form.html" . }}

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The thank-you page

Create content/thanks.md, set the form’s response type to Redirect, and use https://yoursite.com/thanks/ as the success URL. Visitors submit, Crunchforms stores the message and emails you, and the visitor lands back on your site.

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Stop the spam before it starts

Every public form gets found by bots eventually. Crunchforms filters submissions server-side on every plan, including Free:

Honeypot

A hidden field humans never see — if it’s filled, the submission is rejected. Zero friction for real visitors.

Cloudflare Turnstile

Invisible bot detection. Add the widget to your form and Crunchforms validates the token server-side.

reCAPTCHA v3

Score-based validation with a threshold you control per form.
The honeypot alone stops most drive-by spam and takes one extra line of markup — enable it in your form’s settings, then include the hidden field in your form.

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Troubleshooting

  • Check the form is set to Active in your dashboard.
  • If you’ve enabled Turnstile or reCAPTCHA on the form, submissions without a valid token are rejected — including your own tests.
  • Check you haven’t exceeded your plan’s monthly submission quota.
Set the form’s response type to Redirect and provide a success URL (and a failure URL) in the form settings. If you’re submitting with JavaScript, use the JSON response type instead and navigate in your code.
The endpoint accepts cross-origin requests, JSON bodies (Content-Type: application/json), and classic URL-encoded form bodies. Set the form’s response type to JSON so your code gets { "success": true } back instead of a redirect.
Use the Send Test Submission action next to your form in the dashboard — it posts a sample submission to your live endpoint so you can see the pipeline working end to end.

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Next steps

Form configuration

Response types, notification emails, daily summaries, and more

Free HTML form templates

Contact, feedback, RSVP, job application, and quote-request forms ready to paste

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Need help?

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