Would you like your site’s forms to be available offline? This can be especially useful if your site’s visitors lose internet service while filling at a form. With our Offline Forms addon, offline submissions will be saved so visitors can submit their entry as soon as their internet connection is restored.
In this tutorial, we’ll discuss how to get our Offline Forms addon up and running for WPForms.
Requirements: You will need a Pro license level or higher to use the Offline Forms addon.
How to Enable Offline Mode for a Form
Before we get started, be sure you’ve created a form and installed and activated the addon.
To set up offline mode for a form, you’ll need to open the form builder and go to Settings > General. There, you can check the box labeled Enable offline mode for the form.
No extra settings are required, and your form is now ready for offline submissions.
How Offline Mode Appears to Visitors
Now that you’ve turned on Offline Mode for your form, let’s see how this will look in an embedded form.
When connected to the internet, visitors won’t see any difference to your forms. However, if a visitor is filling out your form and loses their internet connection, they’ll see a notice at the top of the form:
As noted in the message, the visitor must return to the page with the embedded form when the internet connection is restored. This will give them the option to complete the submission.
When the user submits a form without an internet connection, the form will refresh and they’ll receive the following notice:
Once the visitor’s internet is reconnected and they return to this page, they’ll be asked if they’d like to go ahead and restore their form entry for submission:
If Restore is selected, the form fields will be re-filled with the contents the visitor tried to submit earlier.
Now that the internet connection and entry contents are restored, the form can be submitted normally.
Offline mode will even work if multiple entries are submitted in the same form. For multiple offline submissions, the visitor will have the option to restore each entry’s contents and submit one by one.
That’s it! You’re now able to set up offline mode in your forms and collect entries even when visitors lose their internet connection.
Would you also like to find out more about who’s filling out your forms? Check out our tutorial on our Geolocation addon to learn how you can easily start collecting more information about your users.