How to Make a GDPR Consent Form in 5 Minutes

Do you want to create a GDPR consent form for your WordPress site?

It’s very important to ensure compliance with GDPR if you’re website with visitors from the EU or the UK.

If you’re collecting information from your EU site visitors using forms, it’s always a good idea to obtain express consent before form submission.

In this article, we’ll look at the easiest way to add a GDPR agreement field to your WordPress forms.

Create Your GDPR Consent Form Now

How to Create a GDPR Compliant Form in WordPress

Using WPForms, you can easily add a GDPR agreement form field to any form on your website. That way, the visitor can freely give consent when giving you their personal data.

Here are the steps we’re going to work through:

At the end of the article, we added a FAQ to help you with the advanced GDPR options in WPForms. We’ll also explain how to easily erase personal information if you’re asked to.

First, let’s step through the tutorial.

Step 1: Install the WPForms Plugin

Creating a GDPR compliant form is a quick and easy process if you’re using WPForms. If you haven’t already, go ahead and install the WPForms plugin on your website now.

While you can use the GDPR enhancements in both the free and paid versions of WPForms, we recommend getting WPForms Pro to access a huge variety of useful features such as the Calculations addon and over 2,000+ form templates.

After you’ve successfully installed the plugin, move on to the next step.

Step 2: Enable GDPR Enhancements

Before we create any forms, we first need to turn on GDPR enhancements in WPForms. When we turn these enhancements on, the GDPR Agreement field will become available in the form builder.

To start, go to WPForms » Settings. You should see the General tab is open.

Scroll down and click the GDPR Enhancements toggle button.

When you click the checkbox, you’ll notice that 2 new options appear underneath.

[alert_box]The options for disabling user cookies and user details will not appear if you’re using WPForms Lite. This is because the Lite version never tracks user cookies or IP addresses.[/alert box]

If you’re using a premium WPForms license, you may want to disable user cookies and additional detail storage to ensure full compliance with GDPR.

Cookies in WPForms

Disabling cookies will also disable features such as the Form Abandonment addon, Related Entries (linked entries submitted by the same user), and Geolocation.

If you’d like to continue using these features, you’ll have to leave the Disable User Cookies option in the off position.

But it’s strongly recommended to mention your usage of cookies in the GDPR Agreement field, so people can consent to it.

IP Address and User Agent Storage in WPForms

The Disable User Details option can be controlled globally from the General tab of WPForms settings from the admin menu.

If you’d like to disable the collection of IP addresses and User Agent on specific forms only, you can do that on a form-by-form basis (more on this in the next step).

Let’s move on and create a GDPR compliant contact form.

Step 3: Create Your GDPR Consent Form

It’s time to create a WordPress form with a GDPR consent field.

First, let’s click WPForms » Add New from your WordPress admin menu.

When the form builder opens, go ahead and type in a name for your contact form at the top.

Next, scroll down a little to the templates area. For this tutorial, we’ll be using a contact form template to speed up the form building process.

Click on the Use Template button under the Simple Contact Form template.

You’re free to choose any other template or even start from scratch using the Blank Form option.

After selecting a template, it will load on your screen in a few seconds.

If you want to add more fields, you can drag them from the left-hand panel to the form preview on the right. Keep adding fields until your basic form is set up the way you want it.

Step 4: Add a GDPR Agreement Form Field

WPForms includes a ready-made GDPR Agreement field that you can add to your form. It can be found under the Standard Fields section.

Drag and drop the field to where you want to place it on your form on the right-hand side area.

After the field is inserted, you can click on it to access its Field Options. These allow you to change the label of your field as well as the agreement text explaining why you’re collecting a visitor’s information.

This field is different from a regular checkbox field. If the GDPR agreement is not ticked, the form can’t be submitted.

Besides, the checkbox can’t be pre-selected. This is important because consent has to be deliberately given by each respondent per GDPR.

If you’d like to collect cookies and IP address information of respondents, we recommend editing the agreement text to clearly mention this as well.

When you’re done customizing your form and the GDRP Agreement field, go ahead and click Save to save your progress so far.

Now, we’re all set to publish your form in the next step.

Step 5: Publish Your GDPR Compliant Form

With the WPForms embed wizard, publishing your form is a breeze.

At the top of the form builder, click the Embed button.

You’ll see a popup open. We’ll click Create New Page here in order to embed the form in a separate new page.

And finally, let’s type in a name for your page.

All set? Click Let’s Go.

WPForms will automatically create a new page. You’ll see your contact form already embedded into it.

Let’s click Publish to publish the page.

And that’s it! Now you have a contact form with a GDPR agreement field.

You can repeat the process to easily add GDPR agreement fields to any form on your website, so you can be sure they’re all compliant with the GDPR.

And that’s it! You can now easily build GDPR consent forms for your WordPress site.

FAQ on GDPR Forms and Compliance

The powerful GDPR controls in WPForms can help you comply with privacy laws in different ways. In this section, we’ll look at the advanced settings in the plugin.

How to disable user agent and IP address tracking in a specific form?

WPForms allows you to disable user agent and IP address storage on a form-by-form basis. To disable it in a specific form, go to Settings » General in your form builder.

Scroll down to the bottom of the General settings and expand the Advanced section. Here, you can click on the Disable storing user details (IP address and user agent) toggle button to stop your form from storing these details.

How can I handle personal data erasure requests in WPForms?

Under GDPR, users have a right to ask for their personal data to be deleted. It’s a good idea to create a separate form on your site designed specifically to let users submit data deletion requests.

To delete an entry go to WPForms » Entries and select the form you need.

Then, simply look for the entry you wish to delete either manually or by using the search box.

For example, you can select Name in the dropdown and type in the user’s name to find all of their entries.

When you click Search, WPForms will show all of the matching entries. Select each entry, then click the Bulk Actions dropdown and click Delete.

Repeat these steps with each form on your website.

Here are 2 things to keep in mind if you get ‘right to be forgotten’ requests:

• In WPForms, entry deletion is permanent. Once you delete form entries, they can’t be recovered unless you have website backups. However, you can move an entry to “Trash” which allows you to either restore them or permanently delete them later.
• You don’t usually need to delete personal data from backups. Most backup plugins will overwrite your old backups automatically over a few days or weeks.

How to disable entries from storing in a form?

Entry storage is a super helpful way to review, manage, and organize form entries from your site. Most people find this helps to keep track of entries, so we recommend keeping it switched on.

However, disabling entry storage can be helpful if you don’t want to store any visitor information at all. You don’t have to worry about user consent if you’re not storing entries at all.

To do that, open up your form and click Settings on the left of the form builder. Scroll all the way down to the Advanced section and check the Disable storing entry information in WordPress box.

Disabling entry storage might reduce the risk of a personal data breach. At the same time, keep in mind that you’ll only be able to receive form responses via email.

Create Your GDPR Consent Form Now

Next, Export Your Form Entries

Do you want to export your form entries? Maybe you need to use them in a different platform, or analyze your data in different ways.

With WPForms, it’s easy to export form entries to CSV. That way, you can easily archive the data if you need to.

Don’t forget to make your waiver forms too. We published a tutorial on making an online model release form that you can use for inspiration.

Ready to build your GDPR compliant form? Get started today with the easiest WordPress form builder plugin. WPForms Pro includes lots of free templates and offers a 14-day money-back guarantee.

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