WPForms Review: A Complete WordPress Form Plugin?

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In today’s post, we are going to review the WP Form plugin. This article, is going to take you through everything you need to know about the plugin. So keep reading because, by the end of it, this plugin might just be the form builder you are looking for, for your business.

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WPForms Plugin Introduction

WPForms has been in the market for a quite some time now and this plugin has garnered a lot of praise over time. With a brilliant 4.9 out of 5-star ratings and 3248 reviews (and counting) for the Free Version, WP forms has a lot to offer to its users.

The WP Forms is a drag and drop form builder plugin and working with it is really very easy. The power punch that this plug is allows you to create multiple, creative forms for contact, subscription, payment etc in a matter of minutes. And its super fast, light-weight, highly advanced and compatible with tons of other plugins as well.

At the time of creating the plugin, the team always considered user-experience as its foremost priority. Therefore to make it beginner-friendly, the team added dozens of pre-built form templates to help you easily get up and running.

The plugin is responsive for devices and screen sizes of all types. It has been very well optimized for performance and receives regular updates too. Overall, it’s a great option for anyone who wants to integrate a Contact Form in their website.

But before we reach any conclusions, let’s explore it a little more, starting with the features.

WPForms Features

As already mentioned, this form builder plugin is extremely flexible and user-friendly. Compatible to screen sizes ranging from phones to computer screens. Most of the themes with their drag and drop features have become the talk of the WordPress community.

Thus, WordPress form builder offers the same level of flexibility and smoothness which allows you to build a form in a matter of minutes. The fields can be arranged for a better visual appeal and functionality with just one click.

The most important thing here is, no coding knowledge needed! You can just install the plugin and get on your way to build the most illustrative user interaction form for your business.

The plugin has been extensively documented so it’s easy to set your hands on it, if you ever face a problem handling it.

Pre-built Templates

Keeping the vastness of the industry category in mind, WordPress has designed this plugin to cater to multiple industries. Some the form option which are frequently used are:

• Contact Form
• Newsletter subscription Form
• Email opt-in Form
• Survey and poll Form
• Donation Form
• Billing and Order Form
• Suggestion Forms
• Feedback Form
• Request a Quote Form

While a few of these templates are available in the basic package, you will have to shell out $49 to $199 to get a host of addons and endless benefits.

If you are from a unique industry and you are wondering if this plugin is the right one for you. Yes, it is. Install the Form Templates Pack addon, and then a tailored form for your business or industry is just a few clicks away.

Payment Collection via Form

Now if you are in the ecommerce business, or exploring the idea of establishing one, then there is a definite need for online payment option for your customers. Or if yours is a non-profit for which you accept online donations, then the good news is, WP form plugin comes integrated with PayPal and Stripe. It has made payments so much easier.

Field Categorization

The fields are categorized primarily into 3 separate sections –

• Standard – Includes name, email, single line and paragraph text, dropdown, multiple choice, etc.
• Fancy – Includes phone, file upload, website / URL, page break, captcha, etc.
• Payment – Includes credit card payment, single / multiple item payment, etc.

Apart from the above, the form is optimized for web and server performance ensuring maximum speed.

The fields are the most important thing to be used in a form. So let me share a brief on how to make your own form in the WP Form builder.

First, select the kind of form that you want to build based on your business needs. Then, Click on the ‘Fields’ option on the left corner of the screen. It will open a pop-up with the most commonly used field options such as name, contact number, email id, address, date and time, etc.

However, intricate fields such as website URL, file upload, payments, etc. are also available when it comes collection of extensive data. Now to create a form of your own, all you have to do is select the required field, drag and drop it in the form on a place of your choosing. Voila, you are done making your form for you website.

Easy to Add a Form

With the arrival for WP forms, embedding your form into the website is just few clicks away. Now, no coding or copy-pasting the short code manually. All you have to do is,

Click on ‘Add Form’ button located above the text editor.

Chose the relevant form from the pop-up.

Select the right form and click on the ‘Add Form’ button.

Smart Conditional Logic

Despite the world slowly going digital, filling an online form is tedious at best. For that matter, filling any form is a pain. For a new user, this is a task he/she will definitely not look up to.

But if you are giving a form to an existing user, then why not give them the fields based on their last form? Wondering if this is possible. Well, let’s just swipe the clouds of doubt from your head right away.

With the WP form builder and its smart conditional logic, you can show only the required fields of the form based on the user’s last form submission.

This way, your user does not have to see the fields which he does not want to fill thus making a form submission less time consuming for him and this whole process also ensures high completion and submission rates.

P.S. – If you wish to recover abandoned forms, WP Form has an addon for that.

Zapier and Email Marketing Addon + Gutenberg Support

Now with all that subscriptions, registrations, requests, quotes, etc. you would not want your mailbox to be choked. For subscription requests, manually collating the email ids and then copy-pasting the data is the last thing you would want to do.

Wp Forms have got a solution for you. It’s auto- integration capabilities to Email Marketing Platforms such as Mailchimp, Drip, GetResponse, Aweber and Campaign Monitor.

Zapier is the most intelligent way to automate inter-app data movement. So if you want to connect your WPForm to your favorite app, which you can choose from the 1300 plus web apps which are already supported.

Zapier allows you to move data from your WP Form to Salesforce, Freshbooks, Hubspot, Twilio for creating lead, invoices, contacts or send text messages respectively. This is just the tip of the iceberg of possibilities that Zapier offers you.

Despite getting some flak since inception, Gutenberg has built a name and carved a niche for itself and is here to stay. WP Forms has added support for the Gutenberg WordPress Editor as well. It’s very own Gutenberg block makes adding WP Forms to Gutenberg managed content a cakewalk.

What typs of Form Can you Create?

Here are some of the forms that you can create with the plugin.

Survey/Poll Form

This form template allows you to conduct surveys and polls on your website. Now, when this form is combined with conditional logic, the survey questions can be personalized based on user responses.

Another feature of WPForms arms you with a feature to share the poll results on your website or your followers in social media. That’s a really nice way to create awareness and reach the masses with just one form.

Login and Registration Form

Now if you are into the ecommerce business, social media platform, video/audio uploading, community centric platforms, or a website that intends to cater specially to its members, you will definitely need your customers to sign in and register.

WPForms answers your call again. Create a form with just dragging and dropping the required fields and yes, such a contact form can be embedded anywhere in the website. Thus not forcing your users to go to the sign in page every time and portraying professionalism by caring about their time.

Payment Collection through the Form

Online shopping platform or a non-profit organization, the option to accept online payments via cards and virtual wallets is always a boon for the user and the service provider.

WPForms is integrated with PayPal and Stripe to facilitate payment. In case of selling merchandise, products or services online, the order page can be designed to make the customer see the their purchases and a classic way to gain their trust and loyalty to your brand.

Post/Comment Submission Form

If your website caters to like-minded people using the internet to speak about common concerns, events, places, activities, etc., then the ‘Post Submission Addon’ fills the shoes for this specific purpose. With this addon, you can accept articles, contents, reviews, testimonials, feedback from your user.

All of the above without having to provide backend access to each and every user. The content will be kept as pending in your post editor and after reviewing the post, you can publish the same.

More Features Available In the Upgraded Version

With the best WP Form plugin, comes the best of features.

• Custom captcha – This option is a good way to fight spam. You can put random math questions or your own questions. That way you can rest assured that your website if a complete spam-free zone.
• Geolocation– It helps you to store location data of your users and visitors along with their form entry.
• Signature – This is yet another brilliant feature that you the plugin offers. It allows you facilitate your users to sign their initiates via the mouse or touchpad. Now that’s a lovely way to personalize user experience.
• Instant notifications – You also get to trace and respond to all the leads that come your way. This sets the impression that you are actively engaged and involved with your business.
• Smart Form Confirmation – With this one you can display a custom message or take your users to a custom thank you page of your website. That is really sweet because these little gestures means a lot when you are doing business.
• Form Locker – This helps you manage form access rules, permissions and controls via password protection, date/time limit to form expiry, limit access to specific users and more. In other words it is kind of a protection layer for your form to avoid spammers and hackers.
• Form Abandonment – It is a sleek feature to capture the data from all the incomplete forms.
• Offline Forms – This feature comes in handy in cases when the internet connectivity is intermittent as it allows the users to submit their forms when the internet is restored.
• SEO – This is now a part and parcel for every website that comes up in the web. I mean, who would create a website and not want it to be found? So even the WPForms is SEO Optimized to gradually reach the masses in a healthy way.

How to Install WPForms In WordPress

Now that I have taken you through the exciting features that this plugin has to offer, let me give you a tutorial on how to install this plugin and get started building your forms.

If you have been using WordPress for a while I am assuming that you are already familiar with the process of installing a plugin. The process is exactly the same in this case too. Here’s how you do it.

Go to the Admin Panel of your website and click on plugins>Add New and type “wpforms” in the search box.

Click on Install and then activate button for the plugin to start working.

Once the installation is done, with the installation you will see a screen with an introductory greeting.

There is a path to a very extensive guide which you can use to know the plugin inside out.

Creating your First Form With WPForms

To the left of your admin panel, you will see different options that lets you create your first form. Click on the Add New option as in the image below.

The basic plugin (WPForms Lite) is free which gives you 3 inbuilt templates ie. Simple Contact From, Newsletter Signup Form, Suggestion Form and the option to create a blank form.

To start with, click on the ‘Simple Contact Form’ template. Adding and removing fields from the form is just drag and drop till you find the look of the form that matches your taste.

You can follow the Gif below to understand how you can build your form.

When you are done creating the form click on the ‘Save’ option to save your first creation. Now on your left hand side, you will see several options like Setup, Fields, Marketing etc. go back to your admin panel and click on Settings>Notifications.

Add your website or brand email in the ‘From Email’ section and ensure that the website is configured to an authorized service provider to send email from the mentioned email address.

The concluding step is to embed the form in the website or WordPress Pages. Click on the ‘’Embed” button and copy the shortcode and paste the shortcode in your desired page’s text editor.

That was not at all difficult, was it?

Displaying Your First Form On your Website

Now that you are all ready with your first form created with the WPForms, its time you display it on your website. So let’s get started.

To be truthful, there are several ways to show your form on your website. So the method you want to choose depends on where on your site do you want your form to reflect. Let’s check out the different ways of doing it.

Displaying your Form On A WordPress Page

To make your form appear on one of your page, start by creating a New Page. Now click on the Add Form button above the page editor to add a form onto your page.

A new popup will now show up under the name Insert Form. Click on the drop down menu and select the form that you have already created.

As soon as you select the form, you will notice a shortcode appear on your editor. If you publish the page, your Form will automatically go live on your website. Here is an example of the live form.

Displaying Your Form In The Widget Of your WordPress Site

If you ever think of adding the form to your widget for example to the footer or the sidebar of your website, then you will have to follow this process.

Start by going to your admin panel. Now on the left side of your panel click on Appearance>Widget. Now scroll down to find the WPForms widget.

In the next step, you will have to drag and drop the WPForms widget to a widget location of your choice. This can be any place where you want your form to show up. When that is done, you are ready to click on the WPForms widget to select your form. Finally, click on the Save option not to loose your settings.

Here’s an exampe of the live form in your widget.

Yay! Your first form has been successfully created and displayed in your website. That was easy right!

Customizing the Submit Button Text

WPForms also offers you with the choice to style your submit button.Here’s exactly how you can do it.

To change the text in your submit button, you will first have to go to the Form Builder>Settings>General.

Here you will see two different fields.

Submit Button Text: This is the text displayed on the button when it hasn’t been clicked yet

Submit Button Processing Text: It is the text shown after the user clicks this button, but before the confirmation is shown to the user

Just go ahead and make the necessary changes that you want in your buttons. Do not forget to save your changes.

Importing Forms from Other Plugins

Sometimes you might not want to redesign a new Contact Form because you are too fond of the one you were using before installing this plugin. So what do you do if you want the exact same one on your website.

Well, the answer is simple. If you are using a different form such as Contact Form 7 or Ninja Forms,WP Forms has a feature using which you can import your forms from the above mentioned plugins to WPForms.

And this step is not a complicated one. You can easily do it within a few minutes. Let see how to do it. To import your pre-built form you will have to first start by visiting your admin panel.

Now under WPForms click on the Tools option. The following page will show up on your screen.

Now click on the drop down arrow under the Import From Other Form Plugins option. Now select the form plugin that you have used previously to design your favourite contact Form. Once done Click on the Import button.

And that’s it. Your form is ready to be used.

Securing Your Form With A Captcha

WPForms lets you protect your form and save them from all sorts of spammers and hackers. To use this facility you will first have to install and activate the  install and activate the Custom Captcha addon.

Once that is done, go to the form builder. Here you will find the Captcha option added to the builder.

Now to create this field in your form you will have to drag and drop it in the preview panel of your form builder. This field will pop up everytime your user shows up, just so that the site receives the maximum protection.

You can click on the field in the form preview panel to open up its Field Options, if you want to edit the field. Under this you will have the options to change your fields.

Under the Type field, you will have two different options. One is the Math captcha and the other is the Question and Answer captcha. You can choose either one that you want to show up to your users or visitors.

The Math captcha will generate random math questions for your users. This can be anything – addition, subtraction, and multiplication questions for your user to answer. These are not any complicated questions just simple ones to ensure its a human and not any spam bots.

The Question and Answer type on the other hand will pose a question for the user to answer. These are simple questions and generally every normal and literate human being can answer them.

Once you choose Question and Answer under the Type field, add your question in the first field and the preferred answer below that. Something simple like this.

If you’d like, you can add additional pairs of question and answers. The Custom Captcha field will display a random question from these sets of question and answer pairs every time your page is loaded or refreshed.

This is to doubly ensure that your site is safe from all unwanted threats.

WPForms Pricing

WPforms have a range of pricing options if you decide to upgrade from the free “Lite” version, take a look below and select the version which contains the features you need.

• Basic Package – At $39 a year, you get license to a single site, spam protection, advanced fields, unlimited forms and entries, multipage forms, conditional logic and one year each for downloads, support and updates. The features here are impressive and specifically designed for those venturing into the website making business or making their own website for the first time.
• Plus Package – At $99 per year, you get everything that basic has to offer such as unlimited forms and entries, spam protection, conditional logic, one year each for updates, support and downloads. Now let’s look at the additional offerings. This package integrates the plugin to MailChimp, AWeber, GetResponse and Campaign Monitor. Along with this you get license to 3 sites. It does look like an amazing deal for people looking for specific data and thus need a purely business driven user interaction form.
• Pro Package – The best package claimed by a vast majority of users worldwide. Looking at what it has to offer, I barely doubt them. So you shell you $199 for one year and you get the entire combination of Basic and Plus. Added to that, you also get PayPal and Stripe integration, user registration, survey and poll templates, zapier integration, license to 20 sites. 20 sites! Wow! Oh I have more to mention here. Exclusive features such as Form locker, form abandonment, offline forms, priority support and bonus form templates, signature, post submission and geolocation. For the money asked, I really don’t find it to be a bad deal. This is the big brother of WP forms packages and you wish to dedicate yourself towards the constant growth of your website and generate fantastic user feedback, reviews, testimonials, support and queries, your search stops here.
• Elite Package – This is designed primarily for thorough professional developers and agencies. Priced at $299 for one year, it has everything that Pro has to offer. But since this package is for a different category of WordPress theme users, it comes with Client management, Premium WordPress Multisite support and unlimited site license. You heard that right, unlimited sites. I am not shocked to hear this because this package is not for one website guy like me. This is for the big players and it is the big daddy of all the packages.

Conclusion

WPForms has been created by one of the best teams in the WordPress space so you can rest assured that it has been coded well and will have amazing support behind it should you run into any problems. WPForms is powerful and but also very easy to use, even for complete beginners.

It’s good that there is a range of different payment plans so you can choose the one you need without overpaying for the features that you would never use. The lite version is also great if you just need a simple contact form solution for your personal site.

WPForms hasn’t been around as long as other contact form plugins like Gravity Forms and Ninja Forms but it certainly holds up against them and should be able to accomplish most of your needs out of the box,

I hope this review has been insightful to the readers and everyone out there searching for a form builder that is as smooth as butter.

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