Smarter form routing for Kadence: Send emails to the right person, every time
If you’ve ever built a contact form with multiple departments, services, or topics, you’ve probably run into the same problem. The form works perfectly — but every submission lands in one inbox, and someone has to manually forward it to the right person.
That’s the problem Kadence Form Router was built to solve.
Early Adopter (One-Off) Pricing – with 3 years of compatibility updates:
- Single site – $59
- 5 sites – $99
- Unlimited sites – $149
Buy an early adopter plan at a one-off price today and receive up to 3 years of compatibility updates. Support will be provided via a community forum (coming soon).
The problem with one inbox
Most Kadence form setups have a single “Send To” address. That works fine for simple enquiry forms, but as soon as your form grows — a dropdown for department, a radio button for service type, a selector for region — you hit a wall.
You want:
- Sales enquiries to go to the sales team
- Support requests to go to the helpdesk
- Billing questions to go to accounts
Without custom code, there’s no clean way to do that. You end up with one catch-all inbox, manual sorting, and the occasional missed or delayed message.
Route emails by field value
Kadence Form Router adds a simple routing layer to your Kadence Advanced Forms. You tell it: when a visitor selects this value, send the email here instead.
The setup takes a few minutes, and it all happens inside the form editor itself — no separate settings page to find:
- Open the Kadence form in the block editor
- Find the Email Routing panel in the right-hand sidebar
- Click + Add Rule and enter a recipient email address
- Set the condition — which field, which value
- Click Save
That’s it. When the form is submitted, the plugin checks the selected value against your rules and redirects the email accordingly. If nothing matches, the form’s default recipient is used as normal.
No code. No webhooks. No third-party services.
Routing lives inside the form editor
In version 1, routing rules are configured directly in the block editor sidebar when you edit a Kadence form. The Email Routing panel appears in the Form tab of the settings panel — the same place you’d set the form title or status.
This means your routing rules live alongside your form, not in a separate admin page. When you open a form, its routing rules are right there. When you save the form, the rules are saved too.
The panel automatically detects the select and radio fields on the current form and populates the condition dropdowns from them. There’s no form selector to configure — you’re already editing the right form.
Multi-condition routes with AND / OR logic
Sometimes one field isn’t enough to determine the right recipient. Maybe you have a “Department” dropdown and a “Region” radio button, and you want UK sales enquiries to go to one address while European sales enquiries go to another.
Each rule can carry as many conditions as you need — each one checking a different field and value.
When a rule has multiple conditions, you choose how they are combined.
AND means every condition must be true. Use this for precise routing:
Send to
uk-sales@example.comwhen Department = Sales AND Region = United Kingdom
OR means any one condition is enough. Use this to funnel similar topics to the same place:
Send to
billing@example.comwhen Topic = Invoice OR Topic = Refund OR Topic = Payment
You can mix AND and OR rules freely across different rules. Rules are checked in order and the first match wins, so you can layer specific rules above broader fallbacks.
Rule priority: what fires first
One of the most important things to understand about routing is that order matters. Rules are evaluated from top to bottom, and the first one that matches wins — the rest are skipped.
The panel makes this explicit. When you have two or more rules, a notice reads: “Rules are evaluated top to bottom — first match wins.” Each rule also carries a numbered badge (Rule 1, Rule 2, and so on) so the evaluation sequence is always visible at a glance.
If you need to change the order — say you realise a broad rule is catching submissions before a more specific one gets a chance — use the ↑ ↓ arrows in each rule header to move it up or down in the list. The badges update automatically to reflect the new order.
A common pattern is to put your most specific rules at the top and your broadest fallback at the bottom.
A practical example
Imagine a professional services firm with a contact form. The form has two fields:
- Service (select): Accounting, Legal, HR Consulting
- Location (radio): Scotland, England, Wales
They want:
- Scottish accounting enquiries →
scotland-accounts@firm.com - All legal enquiries regardless of location →
legal@firm.com - Everything else → the default
info@firm.com
They open the form in the block editor, find the Email Routing panel in the sidebar, and set up two rules:
Rule 1
- Send To:
scotland-accounts@firm.com - Match: ALL (AND)
- Conditions: Service = Accounting, Location = Scotland
Rule 2
- Send To:
legal@firm.com - Match: ANY (OR)
- Conditions: Service = Legal
Submissions that don’t match either rule continue to info@firm.com unchanged. No code, no workarounds — just the form editor and a couple of minutes.
What’s next
If you have a routing scenario that it doesn’t currently handle, or a feature you’d like to see please get in touch.
The goal is to keep it focused, lightweight, and genuinely useful — not to recreate a full automation platform inside a WordPress plugin. For the majority of multi-department, multi-service contact forms, it should do exactly what you need.
Requires Kadence Blocks with Advanced Forms enabled.