Do you want to add a country dropdown list to a form? Putting a list in your form will help your visitors to pick their country quickly when filling in your form.
In this article, we’ll show you how to add countries to a dropdown in WordPress. This is a really easy method that requires no coding, and you don’t have to find a list of countries to copy and paste.
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How to Get a Country List in WordPress
WPForms comes with a preset country list that you can add to any WordPress form.
You can use the preset to quickly add the entire list to your form with 1 click. From there, you can also customize the list so that the countries are formatted and spelled exactly how you want them.
We’ll walk you through all of this in the tutorial below.
The WPForms plugin is the best contact form plugin for WordPress. The country list is just one of the presets you can use.
It also has handy presets for:
- US states
- Country postal codes
- State postal codes
- Months of the year
- Days of the week
These will save you tons of time when you’re making forms.
Keep reading to find out how to quickly add a pre-populated list of countries to any form easily.
How to Add a Country Dropdown List to Your WordPress Forms
There are only 3 steps in this tutorial. We’re also going to show you an optional step if you want to customize the list.
Here are the steps we’re going to walk through:
- Install the WPForms Plugin
- Add a Country Dropdown List to Your Form
- Customize the Countries in Your Dropdown List (Optional)
- Publish Your Form on Your Website
Let’s start by setting up the WPForms plugin.
Step 1: Install the WPForms Plugin
To start, install and activate the WPForms plugin.
If you need a little help with this, read this easy guide on how to install a plugin in WordPress.
You’ll also need a form ready that you can edit as we step through the tutorial. You can create a simple contact form quickly now, or edit an existing form.
When you have your form ready, let’s continue.
Step 2: Add a Country Dropdown List to Your Form
Now we’re ready to add the list of countries to the form.
In the WordPress dashboard, click WPForms » All Forms. Hover your mouse over the form you want to add the dropdown to, then click Edit.
Now we’re in the form builder. Go ahead and drag a dropdown field from the left hand pane to the pane on the right.
Click once on the dropdown to open the settings. We’re going to add the countries using the Bulk Add tool here.
Let’s break it right down.
First, with the dropdown settings open, you’ll want to click the Bulk Add link.
Underneath, click Show Presets to open a list of all the presets in WPForms.
Go ahead and click Countries to load the full list of countries into the form builder.
And finally, click Add New Choices to add all of the countries as new Choices in your dropdown list.
Great! We have a country dropdown list almost ready to go. There are 3 more small tweaks to do now.
First, let’s get rid of the 3 default choices called First Choice, Second Choice, and Third Choice. One by one, click the minus icon next to those items to delete them.
You can use the same method to remove countries from the list if you want to.
Now we should change the label on the field. Let’s delete Dropdown and change it to Please select your country.
Just one more thing. Scroll down again and click Advanced Options. Choose the Modern style instead of the Classic style here.
Why use the Modern style?
- It’s easy to search the list, which really helps when you have tons of choices.
- Visitors can change their selection easily by clicking the X. We’ll show you how this works at the end of the tutorial.
If that’s all you need, you’re ready to publish your form. You can skip ahead to step 4 to find out how to do that.
If you want to customize the list, keep reading.
Step 3: (Optional) Customize the Country Names in Your Dropdown
Now that you’ve added all of the countries to your dropdown, you might want to customize the way they’re set up.
There are 2 things you can do to tweak the list.
First, you can change the way a country name is formatted by editing the choice in the form builder.
For example, you might want to change ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’ to ‘United Kingdom’.
Just edit the text to do that:
Second, don’t forget that you can drag the answer choices up and down. That means you can put the most common selections at the top of the list so that they’re easier to find.
To move any Choice in the list, just click and hold the icon with 3 lines and drag it. Here we’ve moved Canada and United States to the top:
Great! Now your country dropdown will look exactly as you want it to. All we need to do now is publish it.
Click Save before moving on.
Step 4: Publish Your Form
Now your dropdown is set up, it’s time to publish your form. It’s really easy to create a new page right from the form builder.
To use the embed wizard, first click Embed at the top of the form builder.
Let’s click Create New Page.
In the popup, type a name for the page and click Let’s Go.
And now publish the page by clicking the blue Publish button at the top.
Now you can see your published dropdown list.
You can see that the countries we reordered are right here at the top:
We can also search for a country to find it easily:
And if we click the wrong country, we can click the X to search again:
For really long lists like country dropdowns, these extra little features are really helpful and make your country dropdown a lot easier to use.
If you want to check out more ways to create dropdowns fast, check out this guide to adding dynamic field choices to your form.
And that’s it! Now you have a country dropdown on your WordPress form ready for your visitors to use.
If you’re interested in making your forms more relevant to your local area, you can also add a contact form map with a WordPress plugin.
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Next Tip: Get Your Visitor’s Location Automatically
Did you know that WPForms can automatically display your visitors’ location on a map?
You can activate geolocation on all of your forms with 1 click. Check out this guide on how to track user locations with WordPress form submissions to set this up.
We also compiled a list of the best geolocation plugins for WordPress.
Ready to build your form? Get started today with the easiest WordPress form builder plugin. WPForms Pro includes all Fancy Fields and offers a 14-day money-back guarantee.
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hy
i dont see the bulk option why?
Hi There,
Please navigate to form builder > Add any options field (Dropdown, Multiple Choice and Checkbox field) > Under Field Options, you’ll see “Bulk Add”. Please see the reference screencast.
Hope this helps! 🙂
Hello,
How to add conditional logic code in the custom email template.
like, I have a category filed which have 5 subcategories list how to add them into the email template.
regards,
Hi Noor- to achieve what you’ve mentioned here, you can configure the Conditional Notifications setup.
Hope this helps! 🙂
How can i show Search box in dropdown if we have the choices less then eight
Hi Ankit! I apologize I’m not sure I properly understood your question.
It seems that you’re looking to enable the search bar for your dropdown fields, which is done by switching your dropdown field’s style to Modern.
You can find more information about this in this article.
I hope this helps to clarify 🙂 If you have any further questions about this, please contact us if you have an active subscription. If you do not, don’t hesitate to drop us some questions in our support forums.
Hi Henry! I am asking you about dropdown field. Search field appears after adding minimum 8 options in dropdown list, so my question is how will it appear if we have less than 8 options. For more clarification below I have attach a screenshot of wpforms.
https://prnt.sc/1ubkp8b
Hi Ankit! Thanks for clarifying what you’re looking to do. Unfortunately we do not have any options included to force the Modern style Dropdown field’s search bar when less than 8 options are available.
It should be possible with custom code, however I apologize as we aren’t able to provide support for this degree of customization.
In case you’d like to look into custom development options, we highly recommend using Codeable. Codeable screens all developers for you to make sure that they’re highly skilled and communicative, and then also helps guide the entire process of connecting and communicating with a best-fit developer.
Here’s our tutorial on using Codeable, which provides more details on how this process works.
Or if you’d like a team that you can continue coming back to (longer term) for custom development help, you might also consider checking out WPBuffs.
I apologize for not being able to provide you with the solution that you’re looking for, but I hope this information was helpful.
If you have any further questions about this, please contact us if you have an active subscription. If you do not, don’t hesitate to drop us some questions in our support forums.
can you have a dropdown with the country list of the world, geolocation to auto select the correct option from the dropdown AND if that country have states ext showing the states for that country?
e.g. Im located in USA the dropdown list will auto populate USA and show all the states for the USA to choose from. And if im located in South Africa all the provinces for South Africa?
Hi Liza,
Currently, we do not have a native feature for detecting the location and displaying the respective US/ International Address scheme . I do agree it would be super helpful, though. I’ve made a note of the feature request and we’ll keep it on our radar as we plan out our roadmap for the future.
Thanks!
Hello,
I wanted to know if this has been integrated into the amazing wpforms cos now, am looking for it. Really need it.
Thanks
Hey Jude,
This request is still under the review process. I have added your vote to consider this feature as an enhancement.
Thank you!
I am trying to use wpforms dropdown, but the browser is kinda resetting the styling.
Hi Obed, we are sorry for the trouble. Whenever such happens, it is possible that the theme’s styles could be overridden with the dropdown fields. This could be easily fixed using custom CSS. However, we would need some additional details on the same.
In the meanwhile, you could try changing the form styling to Base and if you are already using Base, try switching to Base and form styling. Here is a great Guide that could help you on the same.
In case it does not work, we will need some additional details so that we will be advised on this one.
If you have a WPForms license, you have access to our email support, so please submit a support ticket. Otherwise, we provide limited complimentary support in the WPForms Lite WordPress.org support forum.
Thanks.
United Kingdom, Great Britain etc are not Countries. Why does very few drop down lists include Wales, England and Scotland?
Hey Derek- Sorry to hear about the trouble with that! I have noted down this feedback from you!
Meanwhile, in case it helps, you can manually add the said countries to the list manually after the Bulk Add of the countries.
Thanks, and have a good one!
When i select an option in the dropdown, that selection label is displayed underneath the dropdown and also in the dropdown.
Can the display of the label underneath the dropdown be removed? It seems unnecessary. and is not common behaviour for dropdowns.
Hey Josh, that seems like a theme or styling plugin conflict. Would you mind reach out to us with additional details and form URL so that we can help you further on this case?
Thanks 🙂
Hi! will be possible to add a list of countries but from external list?
Not manual options…
Because if we have more forms with lists countries and we would to edit the list, automatically show the change in all forms.
Thanks!
Hi there,
We currently do not have an inbuilt feature to achieve what you have mentioned. We can consider this feature for future enhancements. However, currently the only option would be to bulk add the choices manually.
Hi! How can we add only Country and use the automatic geolocation? Thanks
Hi John,
Currently, we do not have a Country Specific field that can be prefilled based on the location detected using the Geolocation addon. I have gone ahead and added your vote to consider this as a feature request.
Thanks!