At some point you will want to capture information from your audience if you have a WordPress site. This can be as simple as a contact form or as complex as a recurring donation form. Organizing them can be difficult as these various functions have often required a variety of plugins or custom coding to work correctly. Fortunately, we have discovered that the Gravity Forms plugin can serve as an all-in-one tool for almost all of your user engagement needs.
Gravity Forms for Simple Contact Forms
The simplest use of Gravity Forms plugin is to set up a basic contact form on your WordPress site. These forms will have fields such as Name, Phone Number, Email, and a space for comments. There is no shortage of WordPress plugins that can set up a simple form, usually for free. However, the simplicity and ease of use of Gravity Forms makes setting up these forms quite straightforward. An intuitive drag and drop interface allows you to set up the form in minutes. Many other popular plugins require you to insert variables into a blank editor screen, complete with HTML tags that may be confusing and intimidating. Want to set up a Captcha (i.e. “I am not a robot”) field to reduce spam? Simply drag and drop it to where you want it to be.
A second huge advantage of Gravity Forms is that it saves all form submissions automatically. That is not the case with many other free form creation plugins. In those cases, if you accidentally delete an email, you lose all record of that submission. With Gravity Forms you will always have a record of the contact accessible from the WordPress admin.
Gravity Forms for Third Party Integration
Perhaps a simple contact form is not enough for your needs. For example, your team uses Slack for internal communication, Dropbox for document management, and Mailchimp to manage a mailing list. Your company is about to run a contest where site visitors will submit a essay in .pdf format and then be added to a MailChimp mailing list. This can seem daunting at first, with plenty of error-prone manual updates required. With a traditional contact form, the submission would go to a team member’s email, where they would download the attached .pdf, upload it to Dropbox, add their email address to Mailchimp, and then send a Slack message that they received the email. Some third-party plugins may aid in this process. However, they may be unsupported and eventually become unusable or perhaps even insecure.
Gravity Forms has a plethora of add-ons to make this process incredibly simple. The process described above is handled automatically upon submission with the appropriate add-on plugins installed. Synergy, communication, and accuracy are increased as a result while the likelihood of user error is greatly diminished.
Gravity Forms for Ecommerce Transactions
Gravity Forms has the ability to accept payment transactions. Many popular payment methods (PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.net) are supported. This can be a serious bonus for a site that accepts donations or sells simple products. While it isn’t a substitute for a serious Ecommerce platform like WooCommerce, Gravity Forms can vastly reduce the amount of work required to set up a payments system.
Accepting payments is quite simple. The related payments add-ons contain pre-defined payment fields like billing address, credit card expiration, etc. These fields are treated just like any other Gravity Forms field; simply drag and drop to the position you would like them to appear. You can also set up products complete with price and quantity fields.
We have used Gravity forms for a variety of applications and have been consistently pleased. The price tag is high in contrast with most WordPress plugins. However, you certainly get your money’s worth from Gravity Forms as it reduces development costs and overall complexity. With that said, don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you are interested in incorporating Gravity Forms on your WordPress site.
