Forms detection now off by default

Since April 12th, 2023, new sites will have form detection turned off by default.

This is a seemingly small change, but has a sizable impact in terms of build speeds. Even if your site uses no forms, we scan all your HTML files after a deploy trying to detect them which can take a long time (and of course takes longer and longer with the number of pages you generate).
Forms is an amazing feature of Netlify but with modern frameworks and tools it’s not a regular need anymore. So the feature is not going anywhere, but it’ll require an extra click when you need to use it so we can provide a big gain in build speeds for the most common use case. Read the docs to learn more.

We’ll be following up with a change to update older sites that have never used forms to have the setting off as well, bringing the same speed benefits for them. Sites that used forms at any point will still have the setting on to not cause any disruption.

Will it eventually be possible to specify specific pages with forms (so Netlify doesn’t need to scan every page for them)?

Also, for a plain HTML/CSS with only vanilla JS (and then only for search) using an SSG (in my case Hugo), what kinds of options are there for contact forms (the only forms I have on any of my sites) that don’t involve a third-party service?

If there are alternatives that would work in this scenario with only Netlify-based features (preferably with a light usage ‘Starter’ option, even though I will (soon) be going Pro), and there aren’t already Hugo modules to make it easy for others, I’m interested in creating one.

Hi @danielfdickinson1, thanks for your comments!

Will it eventually be possible to specify specific pages with forms (so Netlify doesn’t need to scan every page for them)?

Good question. Right now there’s nothing in the roadmap for it but it’s a really good idea! I’ll create an issue internally to investigate this (but can’t promise anything!)

Also, for a plain HTML/CSS with only vanilla JS (and then only for search) using an SSG (in my case Hugo), what kinds of options are there for contact forms (the only forms I have on any of my sites) that don’t involve a third-party service?

If there are alternatives that would work in this scenario with only Netlify-based features (preferably with a light usage ‘Starter’ option, even though I will (soon) be going Pro), and there aren’t already Hugo modules to make it easy for others, I’m interested in creating one.

This is exactly what Netlify Forms is for! You can enable form detection for your site and, with just a tiny bit of setup, you can receive email notifications for each submission, without the need of a third party service.
You can find more details in our docs about setup and notifications

2 Likes

Thank you for the above.

I do already use Forms, but I was asking about alternatives because of this comment:

and was wondering if there was a plan to deprecate Forms over the long term. If that is not the case, then I’ll happily keep doing what I’ve been doing with Forms.

Thanks again!

Can this be a general team setting as well?

@tomrutgers

Do you mean a team setting to enable or disable forms? Not sure if that would be feasible for most teams since most of the teams don’t use forms on all their sites. It’s usually a specific site that this setting makes most sense to me, but would be curious to know about your use case.