10 Top Reasons to use Gravity Forms on your website

Jun 19, 2018 | Website Design, Website Plugins

Kevin Fouche

10 Top Reasons to use Gravity Forms on your website

Posted by Kevin Fouche, Pixel Fish Director

Kevin handles the planning, design, launch and training of every website that Pixel Fish creates. He ensures that every website is highly engaging and aligned with our client’s goals. With over 20 years of design and web industry experience to draw upon, Kevin aims to pass on his knowledge to our clients and like-minded businesses wanting to grow their online presence.

Gravity Forms is an advanced forms plugin purpose-built for WordPress sites. If you aren’t already using Gravity Forms, it will be worth your time investigating this functional, powerful and customisable product and its many features. Here are The 10 Top Reasons to use Gravity Forms on your website.

Gravity Forms can create just about any type of form you are after. From surveys, polls, quizzes and support requests to file upload forms, online orders and questionnaires – Gravity Forms has you covered!

Gravity Forms works across both simple forms and rather complex forms and you will find it an extremely useful, practical and robust plugin. There are so many benefits to using Gravity Forms it was difficult to narrow a list down to only ten top reasons!

Top 10 Reasons to use Gravity Forms

1. It’s secure

When working with WordPress and collecting form data, no doubt security is top of mind. Forms can be extremely vulnerable to hackers if they are not sanitised correctly. Gravity Forms is a safe, secure, solid plugin for those who do not want to risk their site being compromised.

2. It’s easy to use

Gravity Forms offer an intuitive interface that is oh-so-easy to use. Simply click the field type you want to appear on your form and it is added to your form instantly! Can’t get better than that!

You can customise your fields by renaming them, rearranging them or defining set choices (for example: checkbox, select dropdown or radio button).

Upon the form’s submission, you can define exactly which notification email will be sent and select where your user is directed. You may choose for your user to see a custom message appear on the page they are on, or that they be directed to a separate page or an external URL.

It is easy for submitted form data to be passed on to a new page. Gravity Forms ensures all of this takes place within the WordPress interface and will store form submissions in the WordPress database.

3. Anti-Spam Honeypot

Online forms are like a baited hook to spammers, but don’t think spammers bother visiting your site to complete your forms – instead, they send their bots to do that.

Those ugly Captcha fields were created to confuse these robots, however while we squint and try to decide if we’re seeing the number 7 or a lopsided capital L, Captcha fields can end up confusing (and frustrating) us, too. Gravity Forms offer an invisible yet highly effective solution to this.

Gravity Forms’ Anti-Spam Honeypot works by adding an extra field to the form, which it then hides from view using Javascript. Users of your site will not see the field, so they will not fill it in. Seeing as these spam bots access your website using programs that don’t run Javascript, they will see the field and will fill it in. When Gravity Forms sees this field completed, it tags the submission as spam.

4. You want to get paid

If you are running an eCommerce site, this one is ultra-important. Gravity Forms offers a complete set of Pricing Fields and integrates perfectly with PayPal. If you want to offer multiple products with multiple pricing options, Gravity Forms can handle it (and will calculate shipping for you, too!).

5. Data Validation

There are over 30 different field types available with Gravity Forms, including fields whose input is limited. Limited fields are those that are limited to only allow certain data (numbers, telephone numbers, dates or email addresses). When users input data into these fields, Gravity Forms will validate the data and will let the user know when the information input doesn’t conform to the chosen type.

6. Conditional Logic

Gravity Forms will show or hide forms based on your user’s response to certain fields. This leaves you with a clean form showing only relevant fields. This prevents both user confusion and the form from looking unnecessarily lengthy.

7. Avoid Form Fatigue with great features (multi-page forms, save & continue)

Gravity Forms offers a few features designed to help avoid form fatigue. One such feature is its multi-page option, which allows you to break your form up into separate pages.

Likewise, the Save & Continue feature allows users to create an account on your website and move through the form, saving the form as they go. They can leave the form and return at a later time to continue completing the form with all previously entered data saved.

8. Apply Your Own Design

You will find that Gravity Forms looks clean, professional and polished just as it comes, however if you would prefer your fields in columns, to display options horizontally or wish add a scroll box to a larger piece of text (such as a Privacy Policy or Ts & Cs) you are able to achieve this using the CSS classes. You can apply your design using several included useful CSS classes on the form fields, which will help you create your own look.

9. Integration with 3rd party apps

Gravity Forms offers a variety of Add-Ons that will integrate with payment gateways, mailing lists, CRMs and communication tools. Although you will need a Business ($99) or Developer ($199) license to apply these add-ons, you will find it worth every penny for what they deliver. The integration options cover services such as DropBox, Fresh Books, PayPal, Help Scout, Slack and many more. (If integrating your forms with any third-party services is not a feature you will use, then a $39 Personal license might suit you).

10. You want some style

Gravity Forms will look better on your website, full stop. Purpose-built for creating forms, Gravity Forms makes creating great forms simple, and the results speak for themselves! Features such as conditional logic, the anti-spam honeypot and 3rd party integration will ensure your forms will appear elegant and uncluttered while they work hard to gather data.

Gravity Forms is one pretty impressive plugin, packed full of advanced features and options. While the types of forms you will be able to create is almost endless, and the features offered are very advanced, Gravity Forms remains very easy to use.

Overall, Gravity Forms is a brilliant plug-in for WordPress users. If you’re considering Gravity Forms for your website, but concerned about how to recreate your existing forms in a new plugin, keep in mind there are a few free plugins on offer to help you through the migration process.

If you’d like to chat with our team about your website we’d love to hear from you.

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