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Detailed Review of Gravity Forms WordPress Plugin – Why You Should Pay For a Contact Form Plugin?
Creating a place on your website where people can connect, share and contact you, is something you will definitely need to add. The reason for this is simple: your online business is build to help other people, right? So, assigning a specific page for them to reach you, is essential.
Here I am not talking about encouraging people to leave comments, rather than creating contact forms so they can interact with you and keep coming for more.
This kind of job can be achieved by creating online forms on your WordPress website. But should you pay money for this kind of setup?
Yes, there are a lot of free contact forms plugins available, but the one we are going to review here has the best available features on the market.
Embed the most advanced forms inside your website using Gravity Form WordPress plugin.
See what are the advantages of purchasing an online forms software in this detailed review.
What does this plugin actually do?
Create advanced forms on your website in minutes, drag and drop style. Gravity forms come with all kinds of fields that you can include inside your website.
Additionally it provides the option to integrate it with third party services such as PayPal, MailChimp, Stripe, AWeber and etc.
Who is this plugin for? And is it for you?
It doesn’t really matter what kind of website you are going to build: business; agency; church; restaurant… you will most likely need to add a contact form somewhere in the site itself.
And since this is really important part of your business, creating working online forms in just a couple of minutes is a great relief, considering the fact that most of the ones available are difficult to set.
Whether you are building simple contact form, email opt-in or a payment page – Gravity Forms can help you set them up.
How to install the best online form builder
Load the downloaded files from your WordPress dashboard > Plugins > Add new. After successful installation activate it when asked.
Next step will be to register your purchase by adding the license key. Click on the newly appeared menu; Forms on the right side, and place the valid key:
Like I already mentioned, Gravity Forms WordPress plugin allows you to create all kind of forms. The company separates them in two different categories: Basic and Advanced. Purchasing the Developers license will grant you access to all of the forms, while the Business one will let you use only the Basic. The most basic package won’t give you access to any of the Add-ons. See the full list below:
What features are included in Gravity Forms WordPress Plugin
One of the main benefits of using Gravity Form builder is the simplicity and the easy process of creating online forms.
But since there are also free contact form plugins that are not too complicated to setup, Gravity forms has to offer something more, right? Yes, it does.
Selecting your fields, adding different kind of buttons, accepting payments and placing them into your WordPress will now seem a lot easier with the build-in tools. The main features in short:
- Form Builder: Quickly create online forms using the drag and drop builder. Just pick the information you want from your visitors and arrange it in beautiful contact form.
- Multi-Page Forms: Make the process of filling the information in a couple of easy steps. The page break field allows you to break up your form into multiple pages and even show a progress bar that let’s your user know where they are in the process.
- Form Settings: Add your custom title, description, settings and confirmation message using the form settings.
- Limit Entries: Let say you have special event and you want only 100 people to use your form. Gravity form builder will allow you to specify the number of entries you will collect and display a custom message when that limit is reached.
- Advanced Fields: There will be times when you want more specific information, and that’s where the advanced fields come in.. from capturing names, addresses and phone numbers to email addresses, website URL’s and even file uploads. The advanced fields are here to ease your job.
- Standard Fields: However, without the standard text field, paragraph field, drop-downs, checkboxes and some radio buttons, this won’t be best online form builder. Of course they are also included and you can use them for your needs. Gravity forms standard fields consist of all the major form field types.
- Schedule Forms: Show your new form only for limited period time. Easily set a start and end date to limit form access and display a custom message when the form has expired.
- Pricing Fields: Accept payments by building order forms. Users can easily see what they are ordering and what is the total price by filling these fields: Product, option, quantity, shipping, total.
- Post Fields: Gravity Forms is adding one more cool thing to the table. It can also create WordPress posts. It’s easy to build a form that creates WordPress Posts on your site. They’re perfect for user-generated content, directory listings and much more.
How to easily create online forms with Gravity Forms plugin
The whole process of creating forms is really intuitive, start by clicking on the Form section located on the right side of your WordPress dashboard and click add new:
Name your form and add a description. Keep in mind that this will also be visible from your visitors:
Inside the form editor you can start designing your own forms. To do so; expand the panel containing the fields you want to use and drag them from the right side of the screen, to the left one.
Move all the fields you want to use for your next form to the left side. Arranging them in a specific order can be done on a later stage, simply drag them and drop them:
Click on expand, to start editing the options in each and everyone of the selected fields. Press the little triangle and the settings will appear:
As you will see, all of the fields are composed from 3 different tabs providing you with different options.
- General: name of the form and what is required from the user;
- Appearance: helps design the form looks;
- Advanced: Couple of additional configurations.
On the top bar, there are a couple of additional buttons that are allowing you to make specific changes.
Form settings: A couple of settings that will allow you to modify the layout, change the “Submit” button text or add captcha to your form:
Entries: View some statistics. How is your form performing and how many people are engaged.
Preview: During the whole process you can preview the form to see how it will look on your website by clicking on the Preview button inside the editor.
Adding gravity forms inside a post/page
After design of the form is complete, access a post or a page. Right next to the Add Media, you will see the Gravity form “Add form” button.
Clicking it will load a pop-up option menu, allowing you to choose a form and embed it inside the post:
Hit publish to view the form inside your post:
Pricing
Gravity Forms WordPress plugin has 3 different annual subscription plans, each with its own benefits.
Personal License: $39/year (1 site, unlimited Forms/entries, autoresponders, export Entries, spam protection, standard ticket support, no Add-ons, 1 year support and upgrades).
Business License: $99/year. (3 sites, Same as personal + Basic Add-ons).
- Developer Licens: $199/year. (unlimited sites, same as Business + advanced Add-ons + priority ticket support).
Pros and cons of creating online forms with Gravity Forms
Pros:
- User-friendly and easy to setup.
- Multi-page forms included.
- Autoresponders.
- Creating order forms.
- Schedule forms.
- The available add-ons will give you a lot of extra option.
- Fast support and detailed knowledge base included.
Cons:
- The main minus is the price.
- Purchasing the personal package is a bit pointless, because you won’t have access to any of the add-ons, which are the main benefit.
Final Thoughts
Should you pay for a contact form plugin? Well the answer to this question is not that simple.
Sure, there are free plugins for creating online forms, but if you want to expand the functionalities of your forms, add all kind of useful options and make it easier for your users to interact with you, you should definitely consider Gravity forms.
This extension is used by more than 1 million people and it really will deliver the promised.
Even though this is an amazing piece of plugin, if you are just starting your site, I suggest to postpone purchasing one of the licenses for a later stage.
What is your case? Are you using free contact form plugin, or you are building them with Gravity Forms?
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