If you’ve ever set up a WordPress site, you’ve probably spent quite some time searching for the perfect plugin to create your forms. Look no further! Today, we’re introducing one of our favorite plugins, an essential and timeless tool that appears in all our projects: the one and only Gravity Forms!
What Can You Do with Gravity Forms?
To start, let’s take a look at the types of forms this tool allows you to create—there are several:
- Simple and Advanced Contact Forms – With multiple customization options and a drag-and-drop functionality, there’s no easier way to create a contact form!
- Payment Forms – Offering the ability to connect and work seamlessly with various payment platforms like Stripe, PayPal, Square, and many others, payments are a breeze.
- Surveys, Polls, and Quizzes – Create attractive, simple, or complex forms that allow you to collect user responses and analyze and categorize them directly in the WordPress dashboard.
- Content Submission Forms – Allow your users to contribute content to your site by linking form entries to the creation of new posts or by using information collected in tables, for example.
- User Registration – Create forms that enable your users to create accounts and easily log into your portal and customize their accounts.
- And More! – Get creative, Gravity Forms can help you create almost any form you desire—the sky is the limit!
Why Use Gravity Forms?
Now that we’ve seen the types of forms you can create, let’s focus on the biggest advantage of the plugin: its ease of use. Gravity Forms is one of the most intuitive plugins available on WordPress at all levels!
- Form Creation Interface
- Creating forms is incredibly simple with a drag-and-drop principle. All available fields are located in the sidebar on the right side of the screen, and you just need to select a field and drag it into the interface.
- Customization is just as easy: you can modify labels, hide certain fields, add a description, placeholder text, a personalized confirmation message, or even decide if the field is required. There’s also the option to add a CSS class for each field, and much more.
- Each field has different options depending on its function. For example, a date field will offer several visual and date format options to choose the most suitable one for your needs.
- Creating forms is incredibly simple with a drag-and-drop principle. All available fields are located in the sidebar on the right side of the screen, and you just need to select a field and drag it into the interface.
- General Settings Management
- All options related to a form are found under the Settings tab, which is divided into four categories. Here, you can manage everything related to submission confirmations, notifications, personal data, and the general options of the form such as the form title, overall layout, restrictions, and spam blocking options.
- All options related to a form are found under the Settings tab, which is divided into four categories. Here, you can manage everything related to submission confirmations, notifications, personal data, and the general options of the form such as the form title, overall layout, restrictions, and spam blocking options.
- Integration into Pages
- Whether through the admin interface or code, adding a Gravity Forms form to a page or post is super simple and intuitive! Using the “Embed” button at the top of the page, you can choose between several integration options, either by directly inserting the form into a page/post selected or created via the dropdown, or by obtaining a shortcode to copy into a page or a WYSIWYG field.
- Whether through the admin interface or code, adding a Gravity Forms form to a page or post is super simple and intuitive! Using the “Embed” button at the top of the page, you can choose between several integration options, either by directly inserting the form into a page/post selected or created via the dropdown, or by obtaining a shortcode to copy into a page or a WYSIWYG field.
- Visual and Technical Customization
- One of the biggest advantages of Gravity Forms is how customizable the plugin is, in the simplest way possible! Their HTML structure and the CSS classes that accompany each form element are easy to use in code, allowing each of these fields to be fully customized with CSS. In the admin, each field also has a place to add a custom CSS class, which can come directly from your code.
- Regarding technical additions or modifications to the form’s functionality, Gravity Forms has a wide variety of hooks and functions, all listed in their very comprehensive documentation available online on their website.
- Entry Visualization
- All form responses are located in the same place in the admin area and are very easy to navigate, categorize, and analyze thanks to the filtering systems present on the page, which allow you to quickly change the status of an entry or filter based on specific responses.
- All form responses are located in the same place in the admin area and are very easy to navigate, categorize, and analyze thanks to the filtering systems present on the page, which allow you to quickly change the status of an entry or filter based on specific responses.
- More Than Complete Documentation
- Gotany questions? No worries! Gravity Forms’ documentation is simple, organized, and contains all the necessary information to guide you, whether it’s to perform a specific action, add and use a plugin, or manipulate Gravity Forms’ native hooks and functions.
What about optimisation ?
Again, Gravity Forms comes out on top! The plugin is designed to run smoothly regardless of your site’s traffic volume and to avoid affecting page load times. Offering an option to activate honeypot directly in the general settings, and integrated reCAPTCHA, your forms are secured in just a few minutes. Finally, Gravity Forms is also compatible with SEO goals, as the forms are designed to remain discreet and not distract from the main content, thus preserving good indexing.
and that’s it?
No! Gravity Forms has another major asset: a wide collection of add-ons developed by the Gravity Forms team and its community that allow you to transform your forms into whatever you desire! These add-ons can be transactional in nature like the Stripe Add-On or PayPal Checkout, can be used to convert form entries into posts with the Advanced Post Creation Add-On, to automate your selection fields with values directly linked to CPTs, categories, taxonomies, etc., and to influence conditional logic automatically based on choices previously made by a user like with GP Populate Anything or even to set and display limits for each available choice in your forms with Gravity Forms Limit Choices, and more!
In short, at TREIZE, Gravity Forms is THE favorite plugin we couldn’t go without to create our forms. We hope this article has convinced you and that you’ll give this awesome plugin a chance in your future projects!
