Do you want to create signed online contract forms in WordPress? With WPForms, you can easily get a WordPress contract agreement signed without having to print, scan, or fax it.
In this article, we’ll show you how to create online contracts for your WordPress website so you can get digital signatures.
Why Create Signed Online Contracts in WordPress?
Creating signed online contracts on your WordPress site is a win-win situation for both you and your clients.
Online contracts on your website:
- Make it easy for clients to sign your contract. With WPForms, you can allow your clients or freelancers to sign documents and online contracts using their mouse or touch screen.
- Are more convenient for you. You don’t have to send email attachments back and forth when you’re using WordPress for online contract signing.
- Allow you to close deals faster. Since you can close more deals in a shorter period of time, your signed online contract forms may lead to faster business growth.
WPForms is the perfect WordPress online contract plugin to make this easy.
Before You Create Your Online Contract
When it comes to creating a service agreement or online contract, many small businesses shy away from using a lawyer. It’s true that you can save on legal fees by doing a quick Google search and writing it up by yourself.
However, when you create an online contract, you’re making a huge business decision. A lawyer can make sure the agreement is written correctly, so you can avoid legal issues down the line.
A typical online contract will usually:
- Specify the terms of service and payment
- Ask for client details including physical address and phone number
- Get the signature of your client
This reduces the workflow when you need a signature before starting work.
To get an idea of what a service agreement or online contact for your business might look like, you can google and look at a sample agreement contract. Most business owners should be able to adapt samples to suit their own needs.
Now, let’s take a look at how to create online contracts in WordPress with WPForms.
How to Create Online Contracts in WordPress (With Digital Signatures)
Here’s exactly how to make a web form that works as an online contract in WordPress.
Here’s a written tutorial if you’d prefer not to watch the video:
Step 1: Create Your Signature Form
Before we create the online contract page, let’s create an electronic signature form to get started. This will automatically add a signature field to your form since it’s a template.
By collecting a digital signature on your website, you won’t need to send the contract back and forth to your clients to get it signed.
In order to accept digital signatures on your site, the first thing you’ll need to do is install and activate the WPForms plugin. WPForms is the best DocuSign alternative for WordPress. And it makes it incredibly easy for you to accept digital signatures and for users to sign your forms.
For more details, see this step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Don’t forget to enter your license key to unlock the addons.
You’ll then need to install the Signature Addon so that users can submit digital signatures in WordPress as a part of the agreement. You can learn how to install and use the Signature Addon here.
This is a super easy way to get signatures on forms without buying a separate WordPress e-signature plugin.
After installing the plugin and the Signature Addon, you’ll need to create an online form. You can see our tutorial on creating a simple contact form to get started.
In our example, we’ll use the Blank Form template so we can create a WordPress contract agreement form from scratch.
Once in the Form Editor, you’ll find the Signature field under the Fancy Fields section.
Click the button to add it to your form, or drag and drop it where you want to place the field.
To make changes to the Signature form field, just click on it. Make sure to set the field as Required so that users can’t submit your form unless they esign it.
Once done, click on the Save button in the top-right corner.
Now, let’s look at the WPForms’ online contract form settings. But if you need a bit more help with setting up an electronic signature-enabled form, check out our guide to adding an electronic signature to a form.
Step 2: Configure Your Form’s Settings
Before you add your form to your online contract page in WordPress, you should configure its settings.
There are many settings you can configure on a WordPress form:
- General Settings: Here you can change things like your form’s name, description, and submit button copy. You can also enable additional spam prevention features to keep your website secure from unwanted form submissions.
- Form Confirmations: Form confirmations are messages that display to site visitors once they submit an online contract form on your website. WPForms has 3 confirmation types to choose from: Message, Show Page, and Redirect. You can choose 1 or a combination of all 3.
- Form Notifications: Notifications are a great way to send an email whenever a form is submitted on your website. A notification will automatically send an email to you once a form is submitted on your site. You can also automatically send an email to the site visitor that submitted the form and anyone else that needs to be notified of a form submission.
If you’ve added a Subscribe checkbox to your online contract form, you’ll need to connect it to your preferred email marketing provider.
WPForms offers the following email service provider integrations:
Click the Save button when you’re done making changes to your contract form settings.
Step 3: Create and Publish Your Online Contract in WordPress
Let’s add the online contract form to a WordPress page now.
Go to Pages » Add New to create a new page. Let’s name our WordPress page Service Agreement and add the agreement text.
To add the service agreement or online contact form, click on the Add Block (+) icon. Now search for the WPForms block using the search box and click on it.
Next, select your service agreement form from the dropdown box to add it to your page.
You can add more content to the page now if you need to, which will help with your site’s SEO.
Then, click on the Publish button so your service agreement appears on your website.
If you want, you can also embed WPForms using shortcodes, or by clicking the Embed plugin in the form builder.
And that’s it! Now you know how the easy way to get signed documents or a signed contract in WordPress.
Next, Set a Closing Date on Your Online Contract
If your quote expires on a certain date, you can set up your form so that it automatically closes. Check out this guide to adding a form expiry date to find out how to set it up.
Want to save more time with WPForms? Try creating a job application form so that you can quickly gather all the information you need to select the best candidate.
So, what are you waiting for? Get started with the most powerful WordPress forms plugin today.
And don’t forget, if you like this article, then please follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
Need to know if this creates a legally binding contract per UETA/ESIGN laws?
Hi Michelle – We recommend seeking professional legal guidance for any questions along these lines. Sorry we can’t be more helpful!
Any way we could get this before a customer goes to a checkout page? If they needed to sign a waiver before purchase?
Hi Maggie!
You can create that page in WordPress and put the Signature from there as it is described in the tutorial, but then you should find a way on how to use that page in your e-commerce system to be displayed before the Checkout page. Then also you would need the redirect after the form submitted to the Checkout page. We don’t have built-in options in WPForms to achieve this, so this should be done with custom code.
Maybe instead, you can contact your e-commerce service support team and ask them for a solution for this. They most probably can answer if they have some ready solution for this, or if they can help you to implement WPForms form into their system.
Thanks, and have a good one 🙂
If you are using WooCommerce, you can add your waiver to the WooCommerce checkout form. At WooCommerce > Settings > Avanced, you can find a Terms and Conditions field, which allows you to choose your waiver page!
Is there a way to have the agreement notification send as a PDF?
Hey Danielle – I am afraid currently we don’t have a feature to automatically convert the notification to PDF and send it as attachment. We will keep that on our radar for future.
I am sorry for the inconvenience!
When someone submits my online contract form it only emails the name, signature and date. I need the entire contract sent with all text as documentation. Can the full form be saved with the text? If I put the text in html fields the html fields do not pass the data in the notification email. Is there a freeform text field that would be saved and passed in the notification?
Hey Anthony – I’m sorry we currently don’t have a built-in way to pass HTML fields in Notification emails, however, if you’re willing you can achieve this with custom code. We also have a tutorial on how to add custom code here.
If you need further help with this, please feel welcome to contact the support team.
I hope this helps! 🙂
I two needed to show the complete contract with the signature as a PDF, as the signature alone is a waste of the plug-in. Here is how I solved it.
1. Wrote the contract up as regular text inside a page.
2. Embed a WP Form that had the signature info.
3. Copied the test contract and pasted it into the WP Form–> Notification–> Message –> then placed {all_fields} after the test. I now get a email that has the whole contract and the signatures info that can be printed as a pdf from my email.
Hey Steve – Yes, that sounds like a great workaround for having all text and signature in your email. Thanks for sharing. It should help other users as well.
Have a good one 🙂
Is it possible to have the contract secure so only you and the two other parties who will sign it have access to it?
Hi Heather! Contract forms as set up in this article would be saved only to your site’s database, which is then accessible only to those users of your site that you grant access to.
You could provide “access” to the contract by using the Notifications feature to provide a copy to whomever filled and signed the form. This feature would provide it to them in the form of an email.
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,
Can we insert the email signature as an image instead of a link in the notification email?
Hi Hanamichy, you can have the image be sent in the Notification email by using some HTML in your email body like
<img src={field_id="3"}>where{field_id="3"}should have the ID number replaced with your signature field’s ID.You can also utilize our field_html_id Smart Tag instead to pull the signature image.
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.
Is this sort of online signature used here legally binding? If so in which countries?
Hi Moaz! Legislation regarding agreements and digital signatures vary from location to location, so we aren’t able to provide you with that information. We strongly recommend that you solicit professional legal advice wherever necessary, pertaining to whichever jurisdictions you require.
I apologize for not being able to give you a direct answer here, but I hope it helped!
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.