GravityForms is a WordPress form plugin that packs with a lot of powerful features. Rather than a simple WordPress contact form plugin, GravityForms extends its features by allowing visitors to send you any kind of information and everything will be stored on your WordPress database for future retrieve.
Although not everyone needs such powerful contact forms, but GravityForms still provide an easy to use WordPress forms builder, which means people who don’t have HTML knowledge can design complex forms also!
Features of GravityForms
There are a lot of features in GravityForms. Before we go through the review, let’s look at some of its features first:
- Drag and drop interface.
- Create posts from external forms.
- Store each submitted form in database for easier retrieve and review.
- Visual forms editor, multipage form supported.
- Schedule form so that the form will only be available for a limited time.
GravityForms provides WordPress users more features than what we actually need. It is easy to customize the plugin based on your needs, and the support forum is always the place where you can find your solution.
GravityForms plugin interface in WordPress
The main plugin interface provides quick access to 8 main features:-
- Edit forms – Edit previously created forms.
- New form – Create a new form.
- Settings – Place where you should key in your license key, reCaptcha settings and also information about your GravityForms version.
- Import/Export – Import or Export forms as well as their extries.
- Updates – Check GravityForms for latest version.
- Add-ons – Download add-ons to enhance GravityForms.
- Help – Access to help, documentation, forums,FAQ and other resources for GravityForms.
GravityForms as a WordPress Contact Form or Support Request Form
Most basic feature for a WordPress form plugin is to create a contact form. It will allow visitors to post questions, reach you and thus has interactive between you and your readers. GravityForms doesn’t stop here. There are two types of fields in GravityForms. The Standards fields contains simple HTML inputs while the Advanced fields allow you to accept different formats of data and perform validation on them.
Email, Address, Time, Phone and Name provide additional features compare to the standard input fields. For example, the Address input is spitted into Street Address, City, State, Zip Code and Country. This save us a lot of time as we don’t have to create each field manually, and the input validation system will make sure users enter the correct format.
Multipage forms
The Page Break button in Standard fields allows you to create a multipage form easily. The most interesting feature of this multi-page is, you can actually set the visual progress indicator to either progress bar or steps.
Limited Entries and Schedule forms
If you would like to run a contest, then these two features could most probably help you a lot. With Limited Entries, you can set a limit of how many entries the form can accept, after that the form will be closed can no one can access unless you unlock it. It is possible to set the custom message when the limit is reached, so that your readers know that they are too late to participate on your contest.
Scheduling a form can be easily achieved by setting the start date and end date of the form. Same as the limited entries, you are able to customize the message for expired forms.
User Generated Content
User generated content can be useful and benefits to your site too. They add more pages to your site, and most of the contents are unique to Google! Examples of user generated content could be Forums, Q7A site and Reviews. For WordPress, user generated content could means allow users submit posts without login. There are a lot of design blogs offer a section called “Community News”, which let readers to submit their latest articles and links. This could be another format of user generated content too.
Most of the WordPress blogs put user generated content and the submit form at their sidebar. There are a lot of methods to create this. You can either install a plugin called FVCommunity News, or create a simple form, let users submit their articles and you manually add them. However, this may not as simple as installing a plugin and activate. You may face a lot of issues in future when WordPress change its core.
GravityForms comes handy in this place, as it can receive user submitted contents and straight publish them. All you need to do is customize the form and create a dedicated page to list out all submitted contents.
Email notifications and Routing
You can set up your form so that the entry is being sent to different people based on user’s choice. This is especially useful if you intend to have a support request form on your e-commerce site.
The power of Conditional Logic
The Conditional Logic is yet another outstanding feature that most of the free contact form plugins don’t have. With Conditional Logic, you can create a survey form easily. The fields will be visible or invisible to users based on their inputs. Together with the limited entries turned on, you can have a simple survey or poll on your site to capture readers’ feedbacks.
Pricing and Conclusion
There are 3 types of license for GravityForms:- Personal at $39, Business at $99 and Developer at $199. The personal Single Site license should be more than enough for a normal user. If you want to install GravityForms on more than one WordPress site, then you should consider Business license as it allows you to install GravityForms on 3 sites. The Developer license is suitable if you need GravityForms on more than 3 WordPress websites.
If you think that $39 is too expensive for a WordPress contact form plugin, then you are probably wrong as I can assure that the features provided by GravityForms are definitely worth the money. Plus, you will get 1 year of free upgrades and supports from the excellent Gravity team. You would be able to find out a lot of creative ways of using GravityForms in the support forum also.
