Gravity Forms – Most Beginner Friendly WordPress Contact Form Plugin

Time to time, we get emails asking us about what is the best contact form plugin? What is the best plugin to create forms in WordPress? In our must Have WordPress plugins list, we recommend Contact Form 7 because it is a FREE plugin, but it does no justice to even compare it side by side with Gravity Forms. We recently started using Gravity Forms on our own site, but we have been working with it for some time on our client’s sites. In this article, we will show you why you need to get Gravity Forms right now, and how it can put your current form plugin to shame. But wait, we will also show you how we used it to build our entire new WordPress Gallery.

In short, Gravity Forms is a full featured contact form plugin that features a drag and drop interface, advanced notification routing, lead capture, conditional logic fields and the ability to create posts from external forms. Well let us walk you through some of the cool features:

Simple Contact and Support Forms

The most basic thing you can use Gravity Forms plugin is to create your general contact or support forms in your WordPress site. A contact form is something that every WordPress site needs and should have. The versatility of Gravity forms allow you to create various type of forms to collect various information with a simple drag and drop. You can collect informations like Name, Email, Phone Number, Address, Website…. heck you can even have the option to upload files. You can set up notifications to route to different email addresses based on conditional rules that you define. You can post the form on any post or page with a click of one button.

You can also include hidden fields to collect data like IP address, or you can even use conditional fields that appear only if a certain field selects a certain value. You can dynamically pre-populate the form fields, and basically do a lot more cool things without knowing a single line of CODE. Most importantly, the captcha option is built-in, so you can prevent the SPAM as well. This is just what a beginner needs.

But wait, there is more.

Surveys, Polling, and Client Evaluation

Unlike other contact form plugins, Gravity Forms go beyond just the contact form. You can use it to do surveys, polling, or even use it as a client evaluation forms. Once again, remember you are doing all of this with drag and drop interface. So you can add as many multiple choice, drop downs, radio buttons, check boxes, and other fields very easily without knowing any codes. This allows you to create lengthy survey forms in minutes that you can do on a regular basis. You can even use it to pop quick multiple choice polls at the bottom of a specific post. Don’t forget the conditional logic system that this plugin has which we absolutely love. You can ask a follow-up question based on a previous response only if the user chose a specific response. All these cool functionalities that you usually have to buy separate softwares or services to get.

Guest Posts and User Submitted Content

Gravity forms make it easy for you to accept user submitted content or guest posts on your blog. A lot of bloggers want to accept guest posts, and we don’t blame them. It is great for both bloggers and guest authors. Guest authors get quality backlinks, and the blogger gets fresh content on their blog. But sometimes managing them becomes a pain in the ***. Most of the times, bloggers accept content via contact forms, and they have to do the image uploading etc themselves. Well guess what? Gravity forms make this easier for you. With Gravity Forms, you can create a guest post submission page that allows your regular and new guest writers to write and submit posts outside of your WordPress admin panel. You can add all the regular post fields (title, image, body, excerpt, category, custom fields or anything you want). Once the user submits that form, that content submission becomes a draft post inside WordPress.

You get instant guest content organization, and you reduce your normal workload that accepting guest posts involves. For busy bloggers, this feature alone is worth the price to pay for Gravity Forms.

But wait, it gets better. You can use it have user-generated content and create custom sites. Check out our new WordPress Gallery. The entire submission process and post creation process is automated with Gravity forms. In the old days, creating a gallery like this would take weeks of coding. This gallery setup took us less than an hour (not counting the design). Here is a Live Preview of the Form Page.

But wait there is more. You don’t have to use your email client to respond to the entries that you get via Gravity Forms. You can simply reply to emails using your WordPress Dashboard. You can add notes to a specific entry (which you can share with the submitter), mark it starred, and more)

Email List Integration

Are you a blogger that wants to offer their users an option to subscribe to your newsletter or email list? Well Gravity Forms has an add-on that integrates with MailChimp and Campaign Monitor. This is a great way to make signing up for your newsletter easier. Ever seen forms that ask you “Would you like to receive updates about our Product”? Well Gravity Forms lets you do that without editing a single line of code. This is a great way to increase the size of your email list. We are using it on our WordPress Gallery Submit Page.

Paypal Integration

You can now use Gravity Forms to sell your products/services as well because it directly integrates with your Paypal account. But this functionality can go beyond just selling products. You remember how we mentioned that we are using Gravity forms to allow users to submit their sites in our gallery? Well, we can now use it to allow submissions of Featured Sites and charge for those posts. In other words, you can use gravity forms to allow paid sponsored posts on your site. You can also use it to collect donations as well as collect recurring payments if you like. This add-on is out for version 1.5 which is still in the release candidate. But we see a lot of potential in this one.

User Registration

We talked about user submitted content above. But this new add-on would allow you to have user registration through the forms. You can use this add-on in numerous ways. First, you can use it to charge for membership on your site. Maybe registered users get special access, and you can charge for registration simply using Gravity Forms. This add-on works with BuddyPress as well. You can also use this add-on to let your users create network sites on your network just like WordPress.com does it. This is another add-on that is for version 1.5 which is a release candidate.

The pricing for Gravity forms go from $39 (for a single site license) to as much as $199 (for unlimited site license with add-ons). But with the features that this plugin offers, it is worth every single penny. We are creating another section of WPBeginner utilizing just this plugin.

Here is a Gravity Forms Coupon.

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