What Is Gravity Forms, Their Advantages, & How to Use It: Updated for 2023
One key component of any WordPress site or any website are forms for contacting you, subscribing to your newsletter, scheduling a consultation, and endless other possibilities.
When it comes to building forms on WordPress, Gravity Forms is by far my favorite. I’ve tried other plugins like Ninja Forms and WP Forms, and they were worthy components. However, at the end of the day, I found Gravity Forms to be a more mature product that had an active development community, plenty of add-ons, and lots of integrations to services I use like ActiveCampaign and Zapier.
In this post, I’m going to go over everything you need to know about Gravity Forms and how to implement them on a page. If you prefer to watch a video, I did a screen recording in 2021 that goes over Gravity Forms; you can find the video below:
What Is The Gravity Forms Plugin?
Gravity Forms is a premium WordPress plugin that is a powerful form builder that will help you create beautiful, stylish, and fully functional forms on your website. Form types include contact forms, multistep forms, job application forms, surveys and quizzes, eCommerce payment and donation forms, and much more!
It allows you to collect information, and then you can choose what to do with that information.
For example, you can connect Gravity Forms to your email marketing or digital marketing service.
If you don’t have that set up, have no fear! It can store the results inside WordPress and also email you whenever a new submission is entered.
Who is Gravity Forms For?
Since Gravity Forms is so powerful, you might think it’s targeted at more advanced users. However, that’s not the case at all!
It has a very easy-to-use and intuitive drag-and-drop editor that allows you to quickly add new fields and columns.
If you don’t know where to start with your form, you can choose from 13 pre-defined templates.
With over 45 add-ons (if you purchase their “Elite” license), you can easily connect Gravity Forms to your favorite email marketing service, CRM, take payments via PayPal or Stripe, and connect to other services such as Slack and Trello.
So, whether you’re completely new to WordPress or a developer, installing and using Gravity Forms is extremely easy. In my use cases, pretty much every integration is just a few clicks away!
What Kind of Fields Are Available?
Gravity Forms has many fields that come with it out of the box; however, if you purchase other add-ons that integrate with it, additional fields become available.
You can add “Standard Fields” such as:
- Single Line Text
- Paragraph Text
- Drop-down menus
- Checkboxes
- Radio Buttons
- … and more
Additionally, they have “Advanced Fields” which are fields you’d normally expect on contact forms, etc. What’s unique about Advanced Fields is that they already have “autocomplete” enabled for that field.
For example, one Advanced Field is “Name” which allows you to ask for the user’s First and Last Name (and Middle Name if you wish), and when the user clicks on the field, it will automatically suggest pre-populated values.
Additional Advanced Fields include:
- Phone Number
- Email Address
- Street Address
- Website
- Date and Time
- … and more
Beyond these fields, you’ll find unique fields like “Post Fields” if you want to use Gravity Forms to post content and “Pricing Fields” for products, etc.
One integration that I especially like is the one with Simply Schedule Appointments. Essentially, I can add a unique “Appointment” field to any form. I’ll dig deeper into additional plug-ins that work with Gravity Forms a bit later in this post.
What Are Some Core Gravity Forms Features?
Form Editor
As mentioned earlier, their Form Builder is one of their more attractive features. The Gravity Forms builder functions as a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface. In the form editor, you can easily add new fields, select types of fields, and rearrange the fields as needed.
Email Notifications and Forwarding
By default, every new form has “Admin Notification” enabled, which basically means that you’ll receive an email whenever someone completes a form. The email contains all the fields from the form.
However, notifications can be configured based on a field from the form, or you can configure routing.
Typically, you’d choose “Select a Field” if you wanted to send an email confirmation to the user completing the form. In this scenario, you’d select the Email field from the form.
“Configure Routing” is another option that allows you to send the form contents to a specified email address depending on the contents or selection of a field.
Conditional Logic
The Gravity Forms’ conditional formatting feature, perhaps its most useful and popular feature, reveals or hides certain fields based on the user’s answers to or selections of specified fields.
One scenario where this could be useful is if you want to request additional information from a user, whether they’re a business owner or not.
Payments
Starting with their “Pro” license, Gravity Forms provides add-ons to integrate with PayPal, Square, and Stripe.
With their “Elite” license, you can also integrate with 2Checkout and Authorize.net.
Confirmations
There are several confirmation options available. You can show text, select a specific page to go to, or specify a URL to redirect to.
One notable feature of all the options is that you can pass along form data, either in text or as a query string parameter.
For example, most of the forms on here redirect to a page with the query string parameter “fname” and I use a plugin called URL Params which allows you to display the parameter value on the page.
How to Add a Gravity Form to a WordPress Page
Adding a form to any page is extremely easy!
If you are using the built-in WordPress editor (called the Gutenberg editor), you simply add the “Gravity Forms” block and then choose the form you wish to add.
If you are using a page builder, like Elementor, then you have a couple of options. You can buy another plugin called Ultimate Elementor, or you can do what I do and simply enter a short code. It looks something like the following, surrounded by square brackets:
[gravityform id="1" title="false" description="false" ajax="true"]For more information about how to use short codes, check out their documentation.
The Vast Integrations with Gravity Forms
When I was originally evaluating which WordPress forms plugin I should pick, what immediately stood out to me was their large community and third-party integrations. To me, whenever I see a community around a product or solution, it’s a good sign that you’re making a safe bet. Here are some great add-ons that extend Gravity Forms and make it even more valuable for your website and marketing efforts…
AFL UTM Tracker
Out of the box, Gravity Forms doesn’t capture lead information or information about the person who submitted a form. If you’re doing any type of marketing, you’ll want to know where these visitors are coming from, i.e., through social media or a PPC campaign.
Thankfully, there’s an outstanding and easy-to-use add-on called AFL UTM Tracker that works with Gravity Forms, WooCommerce, and Fluent Forms.
For each form, you can specify if attribution should be enabled for the form. From there, you can select the conversion type of “Lead” or “Order”. After enabling attribution for a form, when someone submits data using that form, AFL UTM Tracker provides you with crucial information such as the Landing Page, First UTM Touch, Last UTM Touch, Conversion Lag, and a lot more data. This data is added to every form entry’s metadata, so it can be sent to ActiveCampaign, MailerLite, Mailchimp, or, with some light development, have it stored in Google BigQuery for further analysis.
Gravity Perks
Gravity Forms is extremely developer-friendly, as they provide literally hundreds of “hooks” so you can perform your own logic before or after some event. For example, ActiveCampaign is very picky about the format of dates. With most plug-ins, I would need to modify the core plug-in code so that it would change the date before sending it to ActiveCampaign; however, Gravity Forms thought of this and provided a “gform_activecampaign_field_value” filter, which allows me to adjust the format of dates just before it’s sent to ActiveCampaign’s API.
So, what does this have to do with Gravity Perks? Well, even though I come from a development background, I still like things to work smoothly and easily. I don’t want to always have to program my own thing, and luckily, Gravity Perks provides over 32 add-ons for Gravity Forms.
In my experience, their “Populate Anything” perk is their best add-on. You can have fields pre-populated based on prior form entries, the page the form is embedded on, or practically anything else from the database.
They also have quite useful perks such as Easy Pass-through and Better User Activation, which can help you build a much nicer user experience for those who register for your site via Gravity Forms.
WordPress Automation Integrations
As no-code and low-code tools have grown over the past few years, there have also been some new WordPress Plugins. To help you automate your forms and integrate them with other plugins or third-party services, even if Gravity Forms doesn’t already integrate with them.
- Uncanny Automator: This plugin can trigger events to happen when a form is submitted, when a new user registers, when a form is submitted with a specific value, and when a form is submitted with a payment.
- WP Webhooks: This is my favorite automation plugin for WordPress, as it not only integrates with other plugins but also with more third-party services such as Make.com. With over 100 integrations, you’re likely to find a way to connect your plugins or services natively. If not, you can leverage the integrations from Make.com to go even further.
Event Tracking
I wrote a post about how you can track events in Gravity Forms. Check out my article, “How To: Event Tracking with Gravity Forms Made Easy“.
Review Rating
Gravity Forms
Summary
In summary, choosing Gravity Forms for WordPress offers a powerful and versatile solution for creating customized forms on your website. With its user-friendly interface, seamless integrations, advanced features, robust security options, and reliable customer support, Gravity Forms stands out as a top choice for anyone seeking an efficient and effective form builder plugin.
Conclusion
As you can see, Gravity Forms is powerful on its own, but I specifically love it because there are so many third-party plugins that extend it to make it even more robust.
Choosing what plugin you want for your WordPress installation is a big decision, as it can truly drive your digital marketing efforts as it can connect your website with other services.
If you are interested in Gravity Forms but unsure about installing it or configuring it, contact me!
If you have questions regarding this post, please leave them below!
Thanks for reading!
AJ