Do you want to create a veterinary patient intake form in WordPress?
Using an online form helps simplify the process for pet owners. With a form, your clients can easily schedule appointments, fill out forms, and pay for services online.
Having an intake form right on your WordPress website allows you to focus on what you do best: treating your client’s pets. We’ve put together some intake form examples to help you get inspiration for your own form.
In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to make a veterinarian patient intake form in WordPress.
Create Your Veterinarian Patient Intake Form Now
Reasons Your Veterinarian Practice Should Use an Online Form
Here are some reasons why you should switch to an online form for your veterinary office, private clinic, or animal shelter:
- More Accessible: Pet owners can submit intake forms faster right from their desktop computer or mobile device.
- Error-Free Information: Just add the required fields so you get all the details in an easy-to-read format.
- Easier Organization: All your clients’ records are in one place for quick access. You can easily send follow-up emails and receive your patient files effortlessly.
- Immediate Payment: Clients can pre-pay for veterinary services right on your website, so there’s no line at the check-out counter.
- Faster Data Access: Easily search and filter pet and client information and quickly find the data you need.
- Better Use of Staff: Do away with the need for manually scheduling patients to make better use of your veterinary staff.
- Collect Emails: Getting your patient’s email addresses is great for lead generation so you can remind them about their pets’ annual checkups and more.
Okay, so we’ve looked at why you need to use an online veterinarian patient intake form. Now we’ll show you how to create one for your veterinary office, veterinary clinic, or animal shelter.
How to Make a Veterinarian Patient Intake Form
Are you asking yourself how to make a veterinarian patient intake form on your WordPress website?
An online form lets you streamline your intake process. Pet owners can submit important details and make payments even before they arrive at the office.
Here’s a quick tutorial on how you can quickly create a form that will make scheduling easy and gather pet and pet owner info with ease.
Step 1: Create a Veterinarian Patient Intake Form
Using WPForms is the easiest way to make an online veterinarian patient intake form for a veterinary office. WPForms Pros has a wide variety of pre-built templates for every niche and includes lots of forms for business and personal use.
The first thing you’ll want to do is install and activate the WPForms plugin. For more details, check out this step-by-step guide on how to install a plugin in WordPress.
Now that the plugin is active, you’ll need to create a new form. To do this, go to WPForms » Add New and type in the name of your form.
Then, scroll down to the section labeled Select a Template and type “Veterinarian Patient Intake Form” in the search bar.
Then, click Use Template to choose the Veterinarian Patient Intake Form.
Once the pre-built form template loads, most of the work is done for you. You’ll find the following fields are already in the form:
- Owner Information
- Name
- Phone
- Address
- Pet Information
- Name
- Age
- Species and Breed
- Please describe the problem or issue
If you’d like, you can add more fields to your form by dragging them from the left-hand panel to the right-hand panel. For example, you could add a datepicker to your form if you want to let clients schedule appointments.
Then, click on the field to make any changes. You can also click on a form field and drag it to rearrange the order on your patient intake form.
WPForms allows you to accept payments on your forms using Stripe, Square, Authorize.Net, or PayPal.
If you want to use more than one payment gateway, read our article on how to allow users to choose a payment method. Or, read about how to accept payments with Stripe.
When your form looks the way you want it to, click Save.
Step 2: Configure Your Form Settings
To start, go to Settings » General.
Here you can configure the following:
- Form Name: Rename your form here if you want to.
- Form Description: Give your form a description.
- Tags: Use tags to organize the forms on your site.
- Submit Button Text: Customize the copy on the submit button. In our example, we’ll change our submit button to say, “Make an Appointment.”
- Submit Button Processing Text: Change the text clients see when they submit your form.
Expand the Advanced section to edit more options, including:
- CSS Classes: Add CSS classes to your form or submit button.
- Enable Prefill by URL: Fill in some fields automatically based on a custom URL.
- Enable AJAX form submissions: AJAX settings with no page reload.
- Disable storing entry information in WordPress: You can disable the storing of entry information and user details, such as IP addresses and user agents. Also, check out our step-by-step instructions on how to add a GDPR agreement field to your simple contact form.
After you’ve finished with the general settings, go down to the Spam Protection and Security settings.
Here you can:
- Enable modern anti-spam protection — Stop contact form spam with the WPForms modern anti-spam protection. It’s automatically enabled by default on new forms, but you can choose whether you want to toggle it off on a form-by-form basis. This built-in spam protection runs seamlessly in the background to keep your forms safe. You can also pair it with another layer of security, such as a CAPTCHA.
- Enable Akismet anti-spam protection: Connect your form the Akismet plugin to prevent spam submissions.
- Enable country filter: Block entries from certain countries.
- Enable keyword filter: Prevent submissions that include specific words or phrases.
When you’re done, click Save
Step 3: Configure Your Form Notifications
Notifications are a great way to send an email when a patient intake form is submitted on your website.
In fact, unless you disable this feature, whenever someone submits a patient intake form on your site, you’ll get a notification about it.
If you use Smart Tags, you can also send a notification to the site visitor when they fill out the form. This lets them know you received their intake form and will be in contact shortly. This assures your clients their form has gone through.
For help with this step, check out our documentation on how to set up form notifications in WordPress.
WPForms also lets you notify more than one person when an intake form is submitted on your website. For instance, you can send a notification to yourself, the person submitting the request, and your:
- Primary Veterinarian
- Veterinary Technician
- Veterinarian Assistant
- Others in your veterinarian office staff
For help doing this, check out our step-by-step tutorial on how to send multiple form notifications in WordPress.
Lastly, to keep your branding consistent, check out this guide on adding a custom header to your email template.
Step 4: Configure Your Form Confirmations
Form confirmations are messages that display to clients once they submit the patient intake form. These messages let people know that their form has been processed and offer you the chance to let them know the next steps they should take.
WPForms has 3 confirmation types to choose from:
- Message: This is the default confirmation type in WPForms. When a site visitor submits your form, a simple message will appear, letting them know the intake form has gone through. Check out some great success messages to help boost user happiness.
- Show Page: This confirmation type will take your clients to a specific web page on your site thanking them for submitting the form. For help doing this, check out our tutorial on redirecting customers to a Thank You page. Also, be sure to check out our article on creating effective Thank You pages.
- Go to URL (Redirect): This option is for when you want to send site visitors to a different website.
Let’s see how to set up a simple form confirmation in WPForms so you can customize the message your clients will see when they submit the intake form.
To start, click on Settings » Confirmations in the form builder.
Then, customize the confirmation message to your liking and click Save.
For help with other confirmation types, see our documentation on setting up form confirmations.
Now, you’re ready to add your veterinarian patient intake form to your website.
Step 5: Add Your Online Veterinarian Patient Intake Form to Your Website
Once you’ve built your online veterinarian patient intake form, you must add it to your WordPress website.
WPForms allows you to add your forms to many locations on your website, including your blog posts, pages, and even sidebar widgets.
To begin, create a new page or post in WordPress, or go to the update settings on an existing one. After that, click the plus (+) button to add a new block to your post or page. From the options that appear, choose WPForms.
The easy-to-use WPForms widget will appear inside your block. Click on the WPForms dropdown and pick which of the forms you’ve already created you want to insert into your page.
Now, click Preview, and you’ll see your patient intake form as it will appear on your website. If you’re satisfied with the way your patient intake form looks, hit Publish and your form will go live on the Internet.
Then, to view the patient intake form entries after they’ve been submitted, check out this complete guide to form entries. For example, you can see, search for, filter, print, and delete any patient form entries. This makes scheduling and the payment process that much easier.
Create Your Veterinarian Patient Intake Form Now
Next, Increase Traffic to Your Veterinary Website
And there it is! You now know how to make a veterinarian patient intake form on your WordPress website.
Ready to build your 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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