What Is WPForms? +How the Form Builder Works (Ultimate Guide)

Are you asking yourself do I need WPForms? Wondering what is WPForms?

WPForms is a WordPress plugin that lets you easily build website contact forms. It’s full of useful features to help your small business earn more money online.

So in this post, we’ll show you exactly what WPForms does so you can decide if it’s right for you.

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What Is WPForms?

WPForms is an easy-to-use online form builder for WordPress websites. It’s the most beginner-friendly contact form plugin available because you can create smart forms in minutes without writing any code or hiring a developer.

If you’re looking for a WPForms review, here’s a quick overview for you to take a peek at what’s inside the plugin.

Since it was released in 2016, it’s become the form-building plugin of choice for 6+ million website owners.

There’s a free plugin option as well as paid plans. The most popular paid plan is WPForms Pro, which includes access to some of the most helpful features offered by this form-maker tool.

How Does WPForms Work?

Asking yourself, “how do I use WPForms?”

WPForms is super easy to use because it has a completely no-code, visual form builder.

Once you install and activate the plugin, WPForms lets you drag and drop fields onto your forms.

You can pick many pre-built form templates and publish them on your site within minutes. If you prefer, you can adapt your template by adding fields and changing the text. It’s a flexible tool that leaves customization up to you.

You can see a live preview of your form as you build it so you know exactly what changes to make to create the perfect form for your site.

With WPForms you can build anything from basic to advanced forms. Next, we’ll check out how it’s done and review some of the most popular features in WPForms and what they can do.

What Are the WPForms Features?

WPForms offers a wide range of powerful features and addons, which we’ve detailed below.

Below we’ll take a deeper look into what these WPForms features do.

1. Drag and Drop Builder

The drag and drop builder is an easy-to-use visual form-building tool that makes creating forms super easy and fun. To add a field you simply drag it from the left-hand panel onto your form on the right.

And you can drag your form fields up and down in the builder to rearrange their order to your liking.

2. 2,000+  Pre-built Templates

Never start from scratch again. Set up the forms you need for your website in just minutes with our pre-built form templates.

The template gallery includes the most popular forms needed for small business websites, like a simple contact form, order forms, donation forms, newsletter signup forms, and more.

3. Conditional Logic

The WPForms Smart Conditional Logic feature keeps forms concise and organized by hiding and showing fields based on users’ previous answers.

You can use conditional logic to build dynamic forms that adapt as your visitor fills out the fields.

If you’d like to see how conditional logic works, check out these examples of conditional logic in action.

4. Form Field Validation

It’s easy to make a mistake when filling out a form.

With WPForms field validation, you don’t have to worry about mistyped email addresses, URLs, or phone numbers. Plus, you can customize these messages however you like.

This helps to avoid form abandonment because your visitors will instantly see what’s wrong with the information they provided. It’s much less frustrating to get instant feedback instead of having to go back and check all of the fields before submitting.

5. Anti-Spam Tools

WPForms has some great anti-spam tools. Use hCaptcha, Cloudflare Turnstile, Google reCATPCHA v2 and v3, form tokens, or custom Captcha to keep your forms extra secure and your users’ data safe.

You can also use Akismet to filter contact form spam.

Did you know that the free version of WPForms has tons more anti-spam tools than other form builder plugins? Check out our comparison of WPForms Lite vs Contact Form 7 to find out why WPForms is so much better at stopping spam.

6. Form Notifications and Confirmations

The Form Notifications feature is a huge benefit to WPForms. Choose where email notifications are sent after people fill out a form, including to yourself, your team members, and the user.

You can also set up a confirmation message or Thank You page to show users after they submit your form.

This is a great place to share any steps users need to take after submission and to let them know you got their entry.

7. Rich Text Field

WPForms includes a Rich Text field that lets your users style the text in their entries and even upload images.

This is super helpful if you want to let writers submit blog posts to your site or collect user reviews for your business.

The Rich Text field uses the same toolbar as WordPress, so it’s really easy to use.

8. File Upload Field

With WPForms you’ll be able to accept files through your forms. This lets you collect things like PDFs, images, and more through a File Upload Field.

If you want, you can save the files to your WordPress Media Library so you can easily embed them on your site.

9. Digital Signatures

Need someone to sign on your form? No problem.

You can accept eSignatures on your forms and let people sign for things by quickly adding this field to your forms. Then, once the user submits the form, their signature is saved as a PNG image that comes attached to their form entry.

This is a great way to go paperless and reduce waste.

10. Multi-page Forms

WPForms allows you to break up long forms into smaller steps.

That way, you can keep your form abandonment rate low with multi-page forms.

WPForms automatically adds a progress bar so that your visitors can see their progress as they work through each step.

11. Entry Previews

Showing users a preview of their entry before they finish submitting it gives them the chance to correct any mistakes.

WPForms lets you add entry previews to any form in just a few clicks. You can even customize the message that shows on the preview page.

12. Save and Resume

If you have a long form on your website, you might want to let users save their progress and come back to finish filling it out later. This can help increase your form completion rate.

Check out how to add save and continue buttons to your WordPress forms.

13. Stripe, Square, and PayPal Payments

Take payments or accept donations using WPForms Pro. This plan lets you integrate your forms with Stripe, Square, or PayPal. If you upgrade to the Elite plan, you can also use Authorize.Net.

In addition to payment platform integrations, WPForms comes with payment fields for your order forms.

You can display your products or services however you like and show customers their totals before they enter their credit card information. You can even set up coupon codes using conditional logic.

14. Email Marketing Service Integrations

WPForms lets you connect your forms to tons of popular email marketing services for easy marketing automation. Providers include Constant Contact, Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, MailerLite, and more.

With the Elite plan, you can connect your forms to CRMs like ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, and Salesforce.

15. Uncanny Automator Integration

You can automate even more tasks through your forms by connecting them to Uncanny Automator. It lets you integrate WPForms with all kinds of 3rd party plugins and platforms.

For example, you could use it to send yourself a Slack notification every time someone submits your form.

16. Zapier

Put your forms to work for you by using the Zapier addon to connect to over 7,000+ web apps.

17. Surveys and Polls

The Survey and Polls addon lets you gather valuable feedback from visitors and view it in a beautiful reporting dashboard.

Access NPS surveys, star ratings, Likert scales, and more.

18. Offline Forms

With the Offline Forms feature, you can enable forms to save collected data if a user loses their internet connection. Then they can come back and complete the form when they reconnect.

19. Form Abandonment

Capture the email addresses of people who stopped filling out your form before they hit submit. The Form Abandonment addon is a great way to create your form abandonment email marketing campaign.

20. Conversational Forms

The Conversation Forms feature will help you increase conversion rates with gorgeous and modern interactive forms. With just a click, you can turn a simple form into one that feels like a face-to-face conversation.

21. Form Pages

WPForms also has a great feature for turning forms into landing pages easily. With the Form Pages addon, you can create awesome landing pages for your forms that offer a distraction-free experience for a higher form conversion rate.

22. Guest Post Submissions

The Post Submissions addon lets you easily accept guest posts without letting people log in to the backend of your WordPress website. This makes frontend publishing a breeze for all sorts of things, including guest blog posts to help you with user-generated content.

23. User Registration Forms

With WPForms, you can build custom User Registration forms to let visitors create a WordPress account and make their own user profiles on your site. The User Registration addon also lets you make your own Login and Password Reset forms.

24. Form Entry Limits and Restrictions

WPForms lets you accept as many entries as you want for all of your forms. But, if you want to limit how many people can submit your form, you can use the Form Locker addon to do so. This is super helpful for contest entries or signup forms for events that can only have a certain number of attendees.

The Form Locker addon also lets you put restrictions on your forms. For example, you can only show your form to logged-in users or set an age requirement for your form.

25. User Journey Addon

The User Journey addon can help you learn a lot about what’s working well with your website and your forms. See where people navigated to on your website before they found and filled out your form.

26. Geolocation Addon

The Geolocation addon is a handy feature to help you learn more about your leads. It lets you see where people are submitting your forms from simply by turning it on.

You can also use it to automatically fill the Address and Single Line Text fields based on users’ locations by connecting the Geolocation addon to Google Maps or Mapbox.

27. Form Management

Some small business websites need lots of forms. You might have a contact form, quote request form, order form, customer survey, and more all on one site. WPForms helps you easily keep track of all your forms with features like:

• Form Revisions: See past versions of your forms and easily undo changes.
• Form Trash: Move forms you no longer want to the trash folder. If you change your mind, restore them with 1 click.
• Form Search: Use the search bar on the All Forms screen to find the form you’re looking for.
• Form Tags: Add tags to your forms to organize them and see related forms.
• Form Locator: See where you’ve embedded each of your forms.

Check out our complete guide to form management for all the details.

28. Entry Management

With entry management, you can view all your form entries in the WordPress dashboard. From there, you can edit them, favorite them, mark them as read, and even delete ones you don’t need.

If you’re looking for a specific entry, you can use the advanced search options to:

• Find submissions with certain keywords in a specific field
• Look up entries by the user’s IP address
• Search for a specific entry ID
• Find entries based on the user’s payment details
• And more

On top of all these tools, there are many more features on the horizon with this plugin. Our team is always hard at work listening to feedback and releasing awesome new things. In fact, the WPForms team is another great part of the plugin.

We’re known for our world-class customer service. Not only does WPForms have extensive documentation covering every inch of the tool, but we also offer fantastic and personalized support from our highly-rated customer service team.

Ready to get started? Let’s look at how to install WPForms next.

How Do I Install WPForms?

WPForms is super easy to install. And when you’re ready to get started, you’ll be walked through all the steps after you purchase the plugin.

Check out this guide on how to install a WordPress plugin for beginners if you’ve never installed a plugin before.

You can also find step-by-step instructions in this guide on how to install the WPForms plugin.

Is WPForms Free?

You can download the free version of the plugin, known as WPForms Lite, on WordPress.org. It’s free forever and lets you create unlimited forms.

With WPForms Lite, you’ll be able to connect your forms to Constant Contact and Uncanny Automator to automate different processes and build your email list.

Plus, you can connect with Stripe to collect credit card payments without needing to upgrade to the Pro plan. It also gives you access to the notifications and confirmations settings, anti-spam tools, and a select number of templates.

Alternatively, to take advantage of all the other features we reviewed in this guide, you can buy and download a paid plan (WPForms Pro is the way to go) directly from the WPForms website here.

And if you’re a nonprofit, there’s a special WPForms nonprofit discount just for you.

How Can I View WPForms Entries for Free?

If you’re using the free version, WPForms Lite, you can collect entry data through form notifications after those are set up.

You can also turn on the Lite Connect feature to store your form entries securely in the cloud. However, you won’t be able to view them unless you upgrade to the paid version of WPForms.

If you’re using a paid plan, you can store your entries in the WordPress database and access them inside your WordPress dashboard. You’ll be able to see all entries from the time you turned on Lite Connect, or from the time you upgraded to the paid version (whichever came first).

How Much Does WPForms Cost?

WPForms is an incredibly affordable plugin when you take a look at all the money-making features it offers.

And because of this, website owners of all budgets and sizes can and do take advantage of investing in the popular WordPress form plugin.

The WPForms Pro plan is the best deal and starts at $399/year.

There’s also an Elite level plan that’s a great pick for website developers working on multiple sites. This plan lets you use the plugin on unlimited sites, plus gives you the Salesforce, HubSpot, Authorize.Net, and ActiveCampaign integrations.

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Next, Build an Order Form With WPForms

So there it is. A thorough breakdown of what WPForms does and is. We’re obviously fans of the plugin and hope this post sheds some light on why it’s such a popular WordPress form maker.

Looking for extra ways to make money from your website? Head over to our tutorial on how to make a simple order form on your WordPress website.

So what are you waiting for? Get started with the world’s best form builder today.

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