Many aspects contribute to the overall user experience of your website – whether they are pages, posts, layouts, images, WordPress forms, and so on. In order for a website to be successful, catchy, and visually appealing to users, you need to pay attention to these elements.
Therefore, if you own a WordPress website and you’ve pieced together some of the most important pages and posts, you’ll need a form to keep your visitors in contact with you.
What’s a form, you might ask. A form is a structured document that has a specific purpose. It offers you a way to easily collect data as well as creating a database with your visitors for marketing purposes. Basically, it has some fields that a user needs to fill in, in exchange for something.
Below I’ll list some types of online forms you need on your website. Stay close!
Best case practices
Every website needs a form – whether it’s a form of website design or a form that helps you gather contacts. They may not be bringing the creativity out, but they’ll surely skyrocket your website’s conversion rate. Let’s see some of the best case practices!
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Contact form
This one is a must! Having a contact form on your WordPress website will allow your visitors to get in touch with you. This way, you’ll provide professional customer service and gain happy clients. When using a contact form, you can add various fields for specific information that you want to collect.
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User registration
If you want to let people register to your website, you can easily create their accounts with a user registration form. You can specify various custom roles for your users, such as admin, editor, guest, contributor, etc.
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GDPR compliant form
Since the GDPR came into force, many methods of getting consent are no longer valid. To keep everything legal and ensure that you can use the collected data, you’ll need a GDPR compliant form on your website.
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Pop up form
How does a pop-up form work? Well, instead of placing the form on a new page or post, it will simply open in a popup. Lately, it has become a trend, and it will be much easier for your visitors to get in touch with you without having to leave the page.
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Multi-page form
When people see comprehensive forms with many fields to fill in, they tend to leave your website. But we’ve got a solution for you – a form that is divided into pages. Splitting forms into pages will help you increase website conversion rates and not lose customers.
It seems easy-peasy to create an online form, right? Au contraire! As simple as it may appear, if you want to keep your visitors engaged, there are some configurations you need to keep in mind.
10 Dos and Don’ts of online forms
- ✅ Make it relevant
First of all, you’ll need to think about what type of form you want to create for your website. Regarding your topic’s form, you can start building it and adding fields that match the purpose of your form.
- ✅ Keep it cool and simple
Don’t make your form too long by adding many questions. Make it simple for your website’s visitors and add only the essential questions. This way, your visitors won’t leave the form and will fill it out carefully.
- ❌ Don’t be ambiguous
When building comprehensive forms, there will be the possibility to include questions that need additional information for your visitors. Ensure that you provide all the necessary information they need to be able to fill in your form.
- ✅ Add a descriptive title
Every time you want to create a form for your website, add a simple and clear title to let visitors know what they fill in. Don’t try to add complex words because you’ll confuse people. If you want to create a contact form for your page, just write these two words to make it clear and straightforward.
- ✅ Always start with friendly questions
Whatever type of form you create, always start with easy queries like first and last name, phone number, email, address, etc. And always build your questions logically by starting with personal information and then continuing with specific questions.
- ❌ Don’t use long forms
If you’re creating a form that contains more queries, I advise you to break it into more pages with a progress bar. Forms with many fields might bore your visitors, and a multi-page form will decrease the chances of people leaving your form.
- ✅ Add a CTA button
If you want to look like a pro, I advise you to include a clear CTA button at the end of the form. A CTA button can help you increase your website’s conversion rate and keep a professional image for your business. Instead of using words like “submit your form”, you can make it more specific and use “contact us” for a contact form or “get in touch”.
- ❌ Don’t bore your visitors
Try to focus on your form’s purpose and don’t include unnecessary questions. Be short and to the point! Also, try to keep the design clean, catchy, and enjoyable. Make a great first impression!
- ✅ Design your online form
Make sure that your form looks good. Try to match the colors, add catchy images if needed, include charts, and play with fonts until they fit with all your form’s elements. Quality graphics will always impress visitors and make them stay.
- ❌ Don’t forget to test your form
The last and the most important thing, don’t forget to test your form or look at it with fresh eyes. There may be times when you omit some pieces of information, fields, or design elements. You can also ask a friend or a co-worker to check your form.
Recommended plugins for creating WordPress forms
If you want to create an eye-catching yet intuitive form, get started with one of these powerful WordPress form plugins listed below.
Kali Forms
Kali Forms is the perfect WordPress form builder for anyone. Whether you’re a business owner, blogger, agency, or designer, if you want to create a WordPress form, then you need to use Kali Forms. This plugin will undoubtedly adapt to your workflow!
Notable features:
- Drag and drop builder;
- Mobile responsiveness;
- Advanced fields – collect information from users through a big bunch of field types;
- Digital signature – add digital signatures to your form;
- Conditional logic – hide and show fields in your forms based on your user selections;
- Multi-page forms – group your page fields on different pages;
- Form notifications – trigger one or multiple notifications on each submission form;
- Submissions handling – store submission data in your database;
- reCAPTCHA and Akismet integration – prevent spam submissions through Google reCAPTCHA and Akismet services;
- Form templates – pre-made templates that can be added to your form;
- Form calculator – perform simple or complex calculations through your form fields;
- PayPal and Stripe integration – allow payments through the PayPal and Stripe payment gateways.
- Enhance eCommerce – Increase e-Commerce flexibility by adding multiple product fields;
- MailChimp, MailerLite, ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign, Sendfox, Sendinblue; Mailpoet, Moosend, Campaign Monitor – add users to your newsletters;
- Google Analytics – track user behavior on your forms;
- User registration – create, edit, and login users;
- HubSpot integration.
WP Forms
WP Forms is a drag-and-drop WordPress form builder that’s easy-to-use and provides powerful features. We know that building forms in WordPress can be time-consuming; that’s why WP Forms makes this process easy.
Notable features:
- Drag and drop builder;
- Responsive mobile-friendly;
- Multi-page forms;
- Form templates;
- Spam protection;
- User registration;
- MailChimp, Constant Contact, AWeber, GetResponse, Campaign Monitor, ActiveCampaign, Sendinblue, Salesforce, and Drip integration – add users to your newsletters;
- Create surveys and polls;
- Signature addon;
- Webhooks;
- PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.Net integration – to collect payments;
- File uploads – to allow users to upload their files.
Gravity Forms
Gravity forms is another good choice for creating beautiful, powerful, and accessible forms. It provides a big bunch of add-ons to help you build more advanced types of forms. But there’s a catch – it doesn’t offer a free version. However, you can try their demo for free.
Notable features:
- Drag and drop builder;
- Over 30 form fields;
- Conditional logic;
- Email notifications;
- Front-end forms;
- 14+ marketing add-ons;
- Spam protection;
- WordPress post creation;
- Limit and schedule forms;
- File uploads;
- Payment forms using PayPal or Stripe;
- User registration forms;
- Form calculator;
- Surveys and polls.
Now, that we know which are some of the best WordPress form plugins out there, it’s time to create our first form.
For the purpose of this example, I’m going to use Kali Forms.
Create a contact form with Kali Forms, the WordPress form builder plugin
First of all, install and activate the plugin. It’s a super easy process that won’t take you more than a few minutes.
However, you can follow this tutorial on installing and activating a WordPress plugin if you never did this before.
Kali Forms is a great plugin that helps you simplify your work and speed up the process. It is one of the most powerful and user-friendly WordPress form plugins that integrates a significant amount of features.
Let’s see how to handle it!
Create a new form
Whatever you do with your website, you’ll definitely need a contact page with a contact form. So, I’ll show you in this tutorial how to create a contact form for your website.
After installing and activating Kali Forms, go to your WordPress menu > Kali Forms > Add New.
You will be redirected to a page with pre-designed templates. As you can see, there is already a contact form template, but right now, we will show you how to create one from scratch. Press on Create New, and let’s go on.
Start by naming your form so people know what they fill in. You can give it whatever name you find suitable for your contact form.
Adding form fields
The one thing you need to know from the beginning is that you can play around with things – all form fields are highly customizable. Once you select the blank form, you’ll see the menu on the left. To customize a specific field, you just have to click on it after dragging and dropping it into your form.
From there on, you can name your field, add a description to it, and make it required to fill or not. It’s super easy, so let’s see what we need for this specific form:
- A Free Text field for typing a message;
- Two Text boxes for the first and last name;
- An Email field for the contact info;
- A Textarea field for your customers’ message;
- A Submit button for submitting the form.
You can also notice that I’ve made all the fields required to fill to ensure that you will gather all the necessary information.
Customize your form
You can send people an automated confirmation e-mail after they filled in the contact form. It’s a nice gesture that makes a difference. Just go to Notifications, and the whole process of creating the e-mail is there.
After this, you can go to Settings and customize what’s left. You can change your Form Style or even display a thank-you message right after filling in the form. It’s up to you if you feel like doing these things. Update your customers by sending them newsletters – this means that you’ll have to go premium, but it’s definitely worth it!
Click Save, and your contact form is ready for your website!
Add the contact form to your website
After saving the contact form, go back to Kali Forms and copy the shortcode. Then, you can paste it wherever you need – into a page or post.
Now that you have all this information about how complex yet easy-to-use Kali Forms is, the only thing left is for you to give it a try!
Conclusion
And that’s all, folks! I hope this article helped you acknowledge all the necessary information about creating forms in WordPress.
Long story short, people hate filling out forms. If you want to keep them coming back to your website and recommending it to their friends, make sure you follow our tips on designing professional WordPress forms.
Remember this: “quality never goes out of style”!
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Andreea Popa
Andreea is a blog manager who spends most of her days writing and "polishing" articles. She's a mountain lover, and one of her favorite activities is playing with her North African hedgehog, named Frederick.