If you own a WordPress site, you probably find forms to be indispensable for creating a satisfying user experience and increasing your conversion rates.
You need forms for clients to get in touch with you easily, answer simple survey questions, leave feedback, write testimonials, and so on. But you don’t need to have coding experience to create and manage forms. You can use form plugins and form builder plugins!
There are hundreds of form plugins available today. They help you create and manage a wide range of forms to suit your needs. In this article, I’ll guide you to the best plugins on the market today.
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Why You Need a WordPress Form Builder
Forms are the backbone of any website. You can’t do without them. Anything that is done online requires the exchange of information through filling in and sending some kind of form. Forms simplify transactions and save a lot of time. There are forms for everything.
To understand why you need form builders, it’s important to think about the following:
1. How Are Forms Used?
- Forms are used to facilitate transactions: signing up on a website, adding items in shopping carts, filling in shipping information, making and collecting payments.
- Forms allow you to collect, transfer, organize, manage, and interpret various kinds of data from visitors to your website in order to help with your decision-making.
- Forms are also a great tool for generating leads and following up on them, converting them into customers, and onboarding them.
Ideally, any information collected through forms is managed in one central, easy-to-access database.
2. How Are Forms Built?
Forms may look simple, but a lot of thought and work go into building them. First, you have to think about the purpose of the form, what information you want to collect, and how you want users to interact with your forms—whether through typing information or using dropdown menus. You also have to consider how you want to structure your form.
In addition, there is the technical side: actually coding the forms on the front-end and handling their data on the back-end. Where will the information you collect be stored? How will it be accessed? What other systems will this information be linked to—for example, how will the information that is collected be linked to things like invoices, taxes, and shipping?
Needless to say, it would be a lot of work to code a WordPress form from scratch. That’s why you need a form builder plugin! The developers of these plugins devote themselves to making it easy for you to build forms so you can focus on running your business.
What Is a WordPress Form Builder Plugin?
A WordPress form builder plugin allows you to create professional-looking forms for your website quickly and easily, without any specialized coding knowledge. You can create your form using a simple drag-and-drop interface, and then insert it into your website with a shortcode.
Some form builders come with tools to build multiple kinds of forms that serve different purposes. These are the multipurpose or all-in-one plugins.
Other form plugins build forms that serve a very specific purpose: for example, building a cost estimation and payment form.
What Do WordPress Form Builders Do?
Form builders are tools that allow you to create professional-looking forms. They have predefined templates with lots of design choices and customization options, so your forms can be as simple or as detailed as you want.
- Form builders work by generating shortcode snippets that you can embed anywhere on your website or even in an email.
- Form builders have a wide variety of settings: for example, you can receive notifications whenever someone fills out the form.
- Form builders allow you to download reports in CSV, Excel, and PDF formats that you can then analyse and share.
Types of Forms
There are many kinds of forms. Each can serve one or more purposes. Below are some examples. This is not an exhaustive list!
- signup forms—e.g. for new accounts or newsletters
- login forms
- contact forms
- registration forms—e.g. for events
- submission forms
- online order and payments forms
- survey forms
- feedback forms
Best Practices: Things to Keep in Mind When Building Forms
Forms are key to a satisfying user experience.
- When building a form, keep it simple. Less is always more. Remove unnecessary form fields to avoid overwhelming users. Focus on getting the information you need at that particular moment.
- Make your questions simple. Don’t make users type too much.
- All your forms should be SSL encrypted. The same goes for your WordPress website. Users want to know their data will be secure.
- 80% of users do all their online activities on mobile, so your forms should be easy to use on mobile devices. Think of readable font sizes, large buttons, auto-completion, and showing the password as the user is typing instead of masking it.
- Use multistep forms instead of single-step forms. It makes it easier for users to complete filling in the information you request from them.
- Use conditional logic to hide fields you don’t need.
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What to Look for in a Form Builder Plugin
- Responsiveness: It’s 2022, and the ability to create websites that easily and efficiently scale to any devices—desktops, tablets, smartphones—should be a no-brainer.
- Drag-and-drop building and ease of use: because time is money, whether or not you know how to code.
- Customization and flexibility: your form builder has to be able to build the kinds of forms you need.
- Shortcodes: so you can add forms anywhere on your website.
- Integration: your forms might need to integrate with other services like marketing, payment, or monetization plugins.
- Regular updates: if a plugin is not up-to-date, it's likely not secure, and it might have compatibility problems with current versions of WordPress.
- Security: does the seller do regular audits to identify and fix security vulnerabilities that may arise from the use of the plugin?
WordPress Form Builder Plugins on CodeCanyon
Here are some of the most important categories of WordPress form plugins on CodeCanyon, and some of the best plugins in each category.
Multi-Purpose Form Builders
These all-in-one form builder plugins allow you to create a wide variety of forms.
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Login Forms
These plugins allow you to modify your WordPress login form to make it more user-friendly to clients or maybe to leverage social media sign-ins.
Contact Forms
These reliable contact form plugins will make it easy for visitors to reach you with their questions and comments.
Contact Form 7 Builder
Long forms are intimidating and turn users off. Avoid making users scroll all the way down by using CF7 forms.
CF7 forms are user-friendly multi-page forms that include progress bars as well as save and resume features.
Survey Plugins
These plugins will help you create surveys and polls for your website.
Subscription
If you have a subscription-based website, the following subscription form plugins will come in handy.
WooCommerce
The following plugins will allow you to build specialized forms for WooCommerce.
Submission Forms
These plugins make it possible for users to submit and publish content on your site without needing to log in to the admin section.
Estimation Forms
Using these forms, you can give your users access to instant online estimates for projects, products, and services. Some of these plugins can even let users make payments.
Feedback
Feedback from users comes in different ways: ratings, reviews, testimonials, etc. The following articles will guide you to the best plugins that will allow you to build forms for this purpose:
15 Best WordPress Star Rating Plugins
19 Best WordPress and WooCommerce Review Plugins
9 Best Testimonial Plugins for WordPress
Conclusion
These form builders and form plugins are some of the best on CodeCanyon, but there are so many more—maybe even some great plugins that haven't been discovered yet.
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