WordPress Plugin Spotlight: Gravity Forms

Capturing visitor information is one of the most basic missions of your small business website. Whether you’re trying to obtain leads, make yourself available for questions and inquiries, or are offering news and updates via an email newsletter, it’s inevitable that your site will require a website form. Luckily, it can be a relatively easy task to manage, especially if your business website is powered by WordPress. We recommend relying on the plugin Gravity Forms.

“I recommend Gravity Forms to clients for a number of reasons,” says John Hawkins, eWebscapes Client Strategist and an active WordPress speaker. “For starters, it makes the process of creating forms really simple, which is great for websites that are just starting out and maybe don’t need anything complex. But, Gravity Forms is also extremely powerful and customizable. It has a tremendous amount of add-ons available.” It’s probably safe to say that most business owners are not experienced coders, making this plugin very user-friendly for the typical entrepreneur or marketing manager.

The first thing to keep in mind about Gravity Forms is that it is a premium plugin, meaning that it is not free to download and use. However, a basic license begins at only $59 annually. Even a startup would consider that fee pretty nominal. You can view the plugin’s pricing tier on the Gravity Forms website.

When eWebscapes built the redesign for The Association of Aquatic Professionals, Gravity Forms was used in a handful of ways. The nonprofit group needed a contact form, which was a relatively simple task to accomplish. See below for the example.

However, the association also needed to be able to accept payment and sell access to their webinars. Just by integrating the Stripe payment add-on, we were able to accomplish this for The Association of Aquatic Professionals. Again, see the example below.

With Gravity Forms, the real magic happens in the backend of the website. When we talk about the plugin’s user-friendliness, one of the features we’re referring to is the drag-and-drop user interface. Below is an example of the backend look of our website consultation form.

See the buttons under Standard Fields? When building a website form, the user literally places the cursor on the selected button, clicks, drags, and drops in the appropriate spot. Voilà! A form field has been added to the website form. Repeat as necessary to create as many fields needed to fully develop your website form. Be mindful. Too may fields within a form can be a turn-off and cause website visitors to bounce elsewhere.

Additionally, as John previously mentioned, Gravity Forms allows you to create powerful, customized solutions by using add-ons. If you do have access to a website developer or maybe you dabble in coding yourself, know that with Gravity Forms and add-ons, there is no limit to the type of website forms you can create.

“For developers, Gravity Forms can be used as a platform to build some really complex solutions,” John explains, “I like the idea that you can start with a tool that makes it easy to do the simple things, but allows you to grow into the more complex as your needs expand.”

If you’re still not convinced of the power of Gravity Forms, the plugin developers offer a limited-time “test drive” of the tool. Go to GravityForms.com for all the details.