How to Add a Poll to WordPress and Show Live Results

Creating engaging content can be challenging, especially when you need something interactive to capture your audience’s attention.

Engaging your site visitors by adding a poll to your WordPress site is a great way to gain instant feedback on your site visitors’ opinions.

I’ll walk you through the whole setup in WPForms, including the parts most poll tutorials skip, like putting live vote counts in your sidebar and analyzing your poll results.

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How to Create an Interactive Poll in WordPress

A working poll takes about ten minutes in WPForms. You pick a template, write your question, turn on poll results, and embed the form. Follow these easy instructions to get a poll up and running on your WordPress site.

Step 1: Install the WPForms Plugin

As the best WordPress form builder, WPForms makes it super easy to create contact forms, order forms, payment forms, calculator forms, and interactive forms like polls and surveys to get insights into user opinions.

To create a poll using the WPForms plugin, you’ll require the Pro License. This will give you access to a huge list of features, including the Survey and Polls Addon, to increase engagement and collect valuable feedback from your visitors.

So, once you have the Pro license, the first thing you’ll need to do is install and activate the WPForms plugin. For more details, follow this step-by-step guide on how to install a plugin in WordPress.

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Step 2: Activate the Surveys and Polls Addon

The next step is to install the Surveys and Polls Addon, so you can access the poll maker. To do this, go to WPForms » Addons.

Type “Surveys and Polls” in the Search Addons field. Next, click on the Install Addon button and then click on the Activate button.

Excellent job! In the next section, we will demonstrate how to create a lead form and enable polls to view detailed tables and graphs.

Step 3: Create Your Poll Form

To create a poll-specific form, go to WPForms » Add New and type the name of your form, so you can easily customize it later when needed.

Then scroll down to the section labeled Select a Template and type “poll” in the search bar. After that, choose the Poll Form Template.

Following that, you will be taken to the Fields screen. The fields that can be used right now are shown on the left side of this screen.

On the right side, you’ll see a preview of your form that you can customize to edit the poll question you want to ask your site visitors.

Here, you can change the question and the choices your site visitors can choose from. In our example, we will ask people what their favorite dessert is.

Step 4: Customize Your Poll Question and Choices

To make things more exciting for your WordPress poll form, we will add image choices to complement the answers people can choose from.

For help with this step, you can check out our helpful guide on adding image choices to WordPress forms.

If you want, you can stop there and embed your form onto your website. But we’re going to check out some other things you can do to customize your form.

For instance, if you scroll down to the bottom of the Form Editor, on the left-hand side, you’ll see some more ways to customize your poll form.

The first thing you can do for your poll form is select the Randomize Choices checkbox for poll questions to appear randomly to site visitors to reduce order bias.

You can also change the image choice style, if you added image choices to your poll, to Modern, Classic, or None. Lastly, you can change the format of your poll to be one of the following:

• Inline
• One Column
• Two Columns
• Three Columns

When all of this is done, you can now enable poll results and embed the poll form onto your website. Let’s see how to do this.

Step 5: Enable Poll Results in WordPress

Your form collects votes the moment it’s live, and showing those votes back to visitors is a separate switch. There’s one prerequisite that trips people up.

Poll results display underneath your confirmation message, which means the form has to be using the Message confirmation type.

Go to Settings » Confirmation and make sure Message is selected. If your form redirects to a thank you page instead, visitors never see the results.

While you’re in there, write the message people see after voting. Mine is short, but you can say whatever fits your site and the poll you’re building for.

To display poll results to your visitors after they’ve filled out your poll form, go to Settings » Surveys and Polls and select the Enable Poll Results checkbox.

Next, go to Settings » Confirmation to create a custom message for site visitors to see once they’ve submitted your poll form.

Click Save. Here’s what a visitor sees after they vote.

Step 6: Add Your Poll to a Page or Post

Your poll is built, but nobody can vote on it until it’s embedded somewhere, so open the page or post where you want it, add a block, and search for WPForms.

Select your poll from the dropdown and you’re done. The preview renders right in the editor, so you can check the layout before publishing.

If you’d rather place the poll somewhere the block editor doesn’t reach, every WPForms form also has a shortcode.

You’ll find it in WPForms » All Forms in the Shortcode column, and it works in widget areas, page builder text modules, and theme template files.

Our guide on displaying your WordPress forms covers each method in detail.

Step 7: Show Live Poll Results Anywhere on Your Site

The confirmation message only shows results to people who voted, but if you want a running tally that everyone sees, whether they’ve voted or not, WPForms has a shortcode for that.

This is my favorite thing about polls in WPForms and almost nobody knows it exists. Here’s the shortcode which you can modify based on the specified values below:

[wpforms_poll form_id="23" field_id="7" label="true" counts="true"]

• form_id: Which form the results come from. To find it, go to WPForms » All Forms and read it off the Shortcode column.
• field_id: Which Dropdown, Checkboxes, or Multiple Choice field to report on. You’ll find it at the top of that field’s options panel in the builder.
• label: Set to "true" to print the question above the results, or "false" to show just the tally.
• counts: Set to "true" to show the number of votes per option, or "false" for percentages only.

Finding the form ID takes two seconds.

The field ID sits at the top of the Field Options panel once you click the field in the builder.

On the front end, your results come out looking like this.

The shortcode handles poll results only, so survey results from Likert Scale and Net Promoter Score fields stay in your admin area with no front-end equivalent.

If you need to publish those, export the report as an image and embed it manually.

Step 8: Track and Analyze Your Poll Results

Front-end tallies are for your visitors, but the reporting page is for you, and it goes a lot further than a percentage bar. Go to WPForms » All Forms, hover over your poll’s title, and click Survey Results.

Every reportable field gets its own card with a graph and a response breakdown, including totals for how many people answered and how many skipped.

Choices are sorted most-answered first by default. Click the Responses column header to flip the order.

Change How the Graph Looks

Click the gear icon in the top right of any card to restyle its graph. Graph Style gives you Line, Vertical Bar, Horizontal Bar, or Pie.

For a poll with a handful of choices, Pie or Horizontal Bar reads best, since a line chart implies a trend over time that a single poll question doesn’t have.

Graph Color takes a preset or a custom hex value, Graph Size controls how much room the chart gets against the answers table, and Hide Graph drops the chart entirely if you just want numbers.

Toggle Apply To All Graphs to push your settings across the whole report at once, then click Save Changes.

Filter Down to the Responses You Care About

The Filters menu in the top right of the first card applies to every graphable field in the report.

Date Range takes presets from Today through Last 1 year, plus a Custom option for your own start and end dates. That’s how you compare the first week of a poll against the third.

Below it, Questions & Answers lists every question with its choices. Check specific answers to narrow the report to only the people who picked them, or check a question label to include everyone who answered it.

Export or Print Your Report

Each card also has an Export menu in the top right. Choose Current Question for a single field or All Questions for the whole report, pick Graph + Data or Graph Only, then save as JPG or PDF.

Selecting Print as the format opens your browser’s print dialog using whatever graph settings you’ve set. That JPG export is also the workaround for publishing survey results on the front end, since they have no shortcode of their own.

More Questions on How to Add a Poll to WordPress

Looking for answers to your questions? Here are some queries we frequently get asked about regarding adding a poll in WordPress:

What’s the difference between a Poll and Survey?

You might be asking yourself what the difference is between a poll and survey. And you’d be right to ask that because they seem the same. But there is a difference:

• Poll. A poll is used to ask site visitors one quick and simple, multiple choice question. People choose from the answers you provide. You can restrict visitors to pick one answer, or you can allow multiple answers.
• Survey. Surveys are more in-depth than online polls and ask many questions across a wider range of topics. Many times they use a Likert scale to gauge the level of people’s opinions. Surveys are best used to find out about people’s experiences.

How do I add a poll to my WordPress site?

To add a poll to your WordPress site, install WPForms Pro and activate the Surveys and Polls Addon.

Create a new form, choose the Poll template, customize your questions, and embed the form into a post or page.

How do I add voting to WordPress?

Adding voting to your WordPress site can be seamlessly done with WPForms Pro. First, ensure you have WPForms Pro installed along with the Surveys and Polls Addon.

Then, create a form and select a template that suits your voting needs. Customize the form with your voting options, and embed it into any post or page on your site.

How do I add a survey to my WordPress site?

To incorporate a survey into your WordPress site, use WPForms Pro along with the Surveys and Polls Addon.

After installation, create a new form and select the Poll Form Template. Customize it with your specific survey questions.

Once done, embed the survey form on a WordPress post or page. This setup enables you to collect and analyze survey responses directly through your website.

Why don’t my poll percentages add up to 100%?

Almost always because the question uses a Checkboxes field.

Checkboxes let one person select several answers, so each percentage is the share of respondents who picked that option, not a slice of a single pie. Fifty people can each choose two answers and your totals will read 200%.

Switch the field to Multiple Choice or Dropdown if you want one answer per person and percentages that sum to 100.

Can I hide poll options that nobody voted for?

Yes. Empty choices show at zero by default, which can make a poll look sparse in its first few days. A code snippet in the WPForms developer documentation filters unvoted options out of the display, so only choices with at least one vote appear.

Next, Learn How to Add User Ratings to WordPress Forms

If you’re looking for another way to find out how users feel about the hard hitting questions you have to ask, check out how to add user ratings to your WordPress forms.

And to top it off, be sure to brush up on your SEO skills so you can drive more people to your site and boost conversions.

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