I’m using Contact Form 7 on a website I’m building. Currently, Contact Form 7 uses shortcodes, meaning you can drop forms into posts.

Something like 

[contact-form 1 "Sign up form"]

You can’t use shortcodes in template files, because WordPress doesn’t parse them the same way it parses content.

WordPress, however, does have a function to parse shortcodes, where-ever you’d like.

< ?php do_shortcode( $content ) ?>

If your short code needs to display content, then you just need to echo it.

< ?php echo do_shortcode('[contact-form 1 "Sign up form"]'); ?>

Image Credit: seyed mostafa zamani