Are you looking for a form builder plugin for your WordPress site?
Want to add a simple contact form in your Contact or Advertisement page?
Pretty much every single WordPress site needs at least a basic contact form, so a form plugin is a must-have plugin for bloggers.
That is why the most popular form plugins have hundreds and thousands, or even millions, of installs:
As you can see, WPForms is very popular and has a great rating (4.9-stars on over 1,700 reviews). In this post, I hope to show you why the plugin is so well-rated, as well as all of the more powerful features that go beyond simple contact forms.
WPForms Review: All The Features That The Plugin Offers
I want to start off with a quick list of some of the plugin’s most powerful features. These are:
- A beginner-friendly drag and drop editor that makes it simple to create custom forms.
- Premade templates for common form types to save you time.
- Spam protection to help keep your form submissions spam-free.
- Conditional logic so that you can display different form fields depending on how a visitor answers previous fields.
- Option to view form submissions in your WordPress dashboard, as well as the option to receive email notifications.
Beyond those core features, WPForms includes tools that let you go beyond basic contact forms and create things like:
- Payment forms
- Registration/login forms
- Surveys/polls
- Email opt-in forms
- Guest post submission forms
How The WPForms Editor Works
To give you an idea of how easy WPForms makes it, I’m going to take you through the process of building a basic contact form.
When you launch the WPForms form builder, you can choose from a variety of different templates for prebuilt form types:
These are nice because they will save you time. Instead of building everything from scratch, you can start with a template and just edit as needed.
For this example, I chose the Simple Contact Form template.
Once you launch the editor, you’ll see a live preview of your form on the right and the form options on your left:
Adding, Rearranging, And Editing Form Fields
No matter what type of form you’re building, fields are your building blocks.
WPForms includes a wide variety of fields that you can choose from depending on the information that you want to collect.
For example, if you want to collect a person’s website, you can use the pre-made Website/URL field.
In addition to all the basic field types, WP Forms also includes more advanced fields for things like:
- File uploads
- Ratings
- Payments
To add a form field, you just drag it over from the left-hand side:
Similarly, to rearrange existing form fields, you just drag and drop them as needed:
To edit an actual form field, you click on it. Then, you’ll be able to configure the forms:
- Label: This is what appears above the field
- Format: This will be unique to each type of field
- Required: Whether or not visitors need to fill out the field to submit the form
- Other smaller details
If you’ve previously used something like Contact Form 7, WPForms’ easy form builder will feel a lot more user-friendly.
Configuring General Form Settings
Once you’ve set up the specific form fields that you want to include, you can go to the Settings tab to configure:
- Spam settings: These help you avoid spam submissions without requiring your users to enter a CAPTCHA (though you can add a CAPTCHA if desired).
- Notifications: WPForms will automatically store the entry in your WordPress dashboard. But you can also set up email notifications, or even notifications to a Slack channel.
- Confirmation: This is what the visitor sees after submitting the form. You can either display a message or send them to a specific page.
One nice thing about this area is that you can actually set up multiple different notifications. So you could, for example:
- Send one type of notification to yourself
- Send a different notification to your blog’s editor
Embedding Your Form
For a basic form, that’s all you need to do!
Now, you just Save your form and click the Embed button to access the shortcode:
4 Powerful WPForms Implementations Beyond A Simple Contact Form
There are a lot of plugins that can help you create a basic contact form. While WPForms is great owing to the easy form builder that I showed you above, the bigger thing that differentiates WPForms from much of the competition is all the helpful things it can do beyond just creating a contact form.
Here are some of the ways that you can use WPForms on your site to make your life easier.
1. Create A Survey Or A Poll To Engage Your Visitors
With the Surveys and Polls add-on, you can create detailed survey forms or simple multiple choice polls to collect feedback from your visitors:
2. Accept Payments As Part Of A Form
If you think about it, every payment checkout in existence is really just a form connected to a payment processor.
That means, with the Stripe or PayPal add-ons, you can actually use WPForms to accept payments or donations.
You can even calculate different payment amounts depending on which item a user selects:
3. Create A Custom Login Or Registration Form
People are always looking for ways to customize the default WordPress login and registration forms.
Rather than limiting yourself to WordPress’ core functionality, though, you can actually use the WPForms User Registration add-on to create your own login or registration forms that you can embed anywhere in your site.
The cool thing about this is that, in addition to being able to display the forms anywhere, you can also collect extra information, like a short bio:
You can then choose how to input these fields in the user’s actual WordPress profile in the form’s settings:
4. Let Users Submit Blog Posts From The Frontend Of Your Site
With the Post Submissions add-on, you can let people submit actual posts via a form on the frontend of your site.
This feature is powerful because it lets you accept guest post submissions without needing to give people access to the WordPress dashboard (or without needing to upload the posts yourself).
Instead, you can allow them to submit the actual post as a draft. Then, all you need to do is approve or deny it.
If you get a lot of guest post requests, this method can definitely save you some time.
WPForms even includes a pre-built template that lets you collect author information in addition to the blog post content:
Just like the user registration forms, you can choose how to connect the various form fields to the actual areas in the WordPress editor, as well as what status to give the post:
How Much Does WPForms Cost?
WPForms has a free version that’s available at WordPress.org. This free version is great for basic contact forms, but it lacks all the more advanced form uses that I discussed above.
If you want access to those features, the premium version of WPForms starts at $49 per year and goes up to $199 per year depending on the specific add-ons that you want access to:
To save some money, though, you can use our exclusive WPForms coupon code. By entering ShoutMeLoud at checkout, you’ll get 20% off on your order.
Why I Recommend WPForms WordPress Plugin
WPForms is one of those great plugins that manages to blend powerful features with ease of use.
First off, the drag and drop editor is already beginner-friendly. But what makes it even easier is all of the prebuilt templates.
For example, rather than needing to figure out how to construct a frontend post submission form, you can just choose the prebuilt template and edit as needed. This keeps things simple and saves you time.
When you combine that ease of use with features like surveys, payment forms, custom login/registration forms, and more, you get a really powerful WordPress form plugin.
Have you tried WPForms on your own site? Leave a comment and let me know what you think of the plugin.