Web forms are one of the must-haves for a WordPress website. At the same time, they are one of the most underestimated elements of a website. Most owners don’t realize that properly designed web forms could be the difference between success and abject failure.
Whether your site’s purpose is about traveling, entertainment, informing, persuading, or marketing, you must have to interact with your website visitors to know their stance, draw their attention to drive them to the action that you want them to do. If you want to interact with your website visitors efficiently, website forms come first to the spot. A form is one of the best ways to get input from prospective clients and indirectly establish a cordial relation with them.
Probably you already have a basic WordPress contact form on your WordPress website, also a form builder plugin. But do you know the number of different ways you can use this form builder other than your contact form? Wondering what are the different types of WordPress forms you can use and why need them?
You might be surprised to learn how many different types of forms you can add to websites. So if you’re looking to boost your website’s success, check out all these different kinds of WordPress forms to grow your business. Below are some of the different online forms you can use for your website, along with some tips you should know to make sure you’re doing it right.
Tips for Styling Web Forms:
Before going to discuss what type of forms you need on your website, you should learn some tips for styling your forms. While creating a form with a WordPress Form Plugin you should consider the following best practices:
- Never include too many fields on a form. Keep the form simple and straightforward.
- Never use redundant fields on the form. It’s important to incorporate only the necessary fields and discard those with little value. Users are likely to respond better to a form with most relevant questions.
- Give attention to the design to ensure that users fill out the form with enthusiasm. The design of the form should be clean, uncluttered, and visually appealing.
- Sometimes you have to embellish your form with a lot of consequential fields but online users are less likely to spend much time on a single web page. So, multi-step forms work best when the form is too long. But, keep the steps within two or three so that you can have more conversions.
- In many cases, some of the form fields may be unnecessary for particular users. It’s a good practice to hide the unnecessary elements. Conditional logic allows you to hide and show the elements in your way and users only have to fill out their required fields. Now, thinking how to make a form with conditional logic? No worries! Check Make A Smart Form With Conditional Logic.
- Security comes first, so use reCaptcha or math captch field on your form to prevent spamming. To learn how to set reCaptcha or math captcha on the form and keep your form spam free check this.
- A simple appreciation and acknowledgment make users trust your system. So, use thank you page or a confirmation page when a user submits a form. A number of people can get perplexed with what to write or what is the right version of a particular input. Use the help-text to make it understandable for your visitors who do not have any technical knowledge.
- Mobile devices now account for more traffic than computers. So it’s highly recommended to check if the form is mobile responsive so that, users can fills up the form using mobile.
- If any information entered by the user is wrong then show him an error message with details. So they can understand where they went wrong.
Types of Forms Every WordPress Website Need:
Most website owners don’t give attention to web forms. But they can be a game-changer for your business. Here are some common types of web forms which can help you in growing your business.
Contact Form:
Contact form is the most basic form that every website needs. I would say it’s a mandatory form for every website. A simple contact form is the first step for your customers to easily reach you without spammers skimming your email address.
With a contact form, you can ask users for certain details, such as their name, contact information, and order number. They may also have a drop-down or text-entry field for leads to explain their reason for reaching out and their preferred method of contact. How To Create A Contact Form In WordPress? is the easiest tutorial on creating a contact form. You can check that tutorial if you don’t know how to create one.
Why use a contact form? Contact forms are used for leads to ask your business a question, voice a concern or even explain their need for a refund. To know more about why you need a contact form on your website, I request you to check this article. It will clear out all of your confusion regarding why you need a contact form.
User Registration Form:
A user registration form is a form located on a web page making it possible for someone to fill it out and begin the opt-in subscription process. A user would complete a registration form if they were interested in your service. It’s a subscription box you can add to your site, blog, or social page to collect new email subscribers. User registration form builds high-value email lists.
With a user registration form, you can ask for personal information in exchange for accessing content or services. Designers have to figure out a way to encourage people to fill registration forms out. Before asking them for any information, it is very important to provide them a reason why they should register. In other words, sum up the benefits of registering with your site in 1 or 2 sentences at most.
If you’re a business that requires membership, you can also utilize this form. It doesn’t put pressure on your customers to commit right away. You can always send them marketing communications in the future to drive them towards a purchase decision.
Lastly, e-commerce websites also rely heavily on user registration forms because they’re a mandatory step before any purchase, which is why we’ll cover those aspects as well. If a lead was looking to list an item on one of these sites, they would complete a registration form to create an account and then post the item. Take an example of any of the Social Media websites, users can’t get engaged with these platforms unless they create an account.
The best place to add an email signup form is somewhere prominent on your website, like your sidebar. To generate maximum signups, you have to minimize the steps involved in registering, and at the same time, make the most of the few elements you do use. When you create a registration option specific, you know signups are definitely interested in receiving your content, via email! No need for asking the user to re-type their email address or password!
User Login Form:
A user login form is also a type of WordPress sign-in form on your website that allows previously registered users to sign in with their credentials to access. It is a door that users must open to get the best out of their user experience with a website. It is the starting point of navigating a website in a personalized manner. By creating an account on a website, a user gets to customize some aspects of experience with the site and get access to membership benefits.
The User login form contains a field for the username and another for the password. When the login form is submitted its underlying code checks that the credentials are authentic, giving the user can access to the restricted page. If a user is unable to provide authentic credentials they will not be able to proceed past the login form.
In that case, it would be a hassle to contact support just because users don’t remember their passwords. This is the reason why you’ll have to implement a ‘Forgot your password?’ function on the login screen. When users click it, they should receive a link in their email that lets them change their credentials and log in to the website without further issues.
To reduce the number of people who request to change their passwords because they forgot them, it would be best to add a ‘Remember me’ option at the end of the login form. Once checked, this option saves the credentials, and each time that person accesses the page, their email and password will pop up in the form, or they will show up as already logged in. Check How To Create A Custom User Login Form in WordPress Website? to create your website’s custom user login form.
Newsletter Signup Form:
When we talk about newsletter signup, we’re referring to a process by which visitors elect to receive updates from an online business through email. Newsletter signup is a core component of every successful email marketing strategy. Since online businesses can’t establish bonds as brick-and-mortar stores do, they need a reliable channel to engage with their target audience and incentivize them to buy their products.
You never know the people visiting your website today, will ever come back again or not. A newsletter is a great way to convert one-time visitors into repeat visitors. Starting an email newsletter will allow you to bring them back to your website, and convert them into customers. Once they join the newsletter, you will be able to stay in touch and bring them back to your website.
Newsletter signup forms are quite simplistic, only ever requiring one or two fields for users to submit. Visitors can only enter their email addresses and hit subscribe. Try to place your newsletter signup form on the page a customer visits the most. If they came across your website’s blog using a keyword search, you can add the newsletter signup form as part of your CTA. At the same time, if they just purchased a product from you, you can include it during the ordering process or confirmation email.
Online Order Form:
Online order forms do exactly what it sounds like, they allow your website visitors to place orders. If you’re selling products or services online, you probably want to focus more on fulfilling your orders rather than the process of collecting them. Including an online order form on your WordPress website, give your prospects the choice to buy at their convenience.
Online order forms help customers easily place their orders whether they’re using desktops or mobile devices and provide you with sufficient information about the order to fulfill it quickly and efficiently. Order forms should be detailed and may include credit card, shipping, and billing information, and your contact information. So, they also provide customers with a way to pay for items and have the products they have ordered sent directly to them. That’s why having a website order form is essential for a growing business.
Customer Feedback Form:
Customer feedback plays a wonderful role in improving your business by letting you modify your approach based on their opinion. It helps improve product development, marketing, operations and so much more. The best option to make sure you can fully understand your product or service marketplace is to obtain qualitative and honest customer feedback. However, it’s one of the most important aspects of running a business that often gets overlooked.
So how can you be sure your customer service strategies are working? How do you know if your customers are happy with their experiences in your company? What do they like and dislike about your products or services? And more importantly, how can you best keep up with their ever-changing requirements?
The most important way of fully understanding a customer’s perception of your brand is by asking them directly, and the best way to simply hear the voice of your customer is through their own feedback. This is where you need a customer feedback form. When there is a good custom design form, users tend to give information and it is useful in deciding your business’s next steps in performance assessment. Even if just a few people care to respond, you’ll already get a better idea of which step might be the bottleneck for higher conversions.
Job Application Form:
A job application form is part of the formal hiring process where an official form is given to the prospective candidate to drop their resumes. Using this simple form prospective employees can apply for a job easily.
Employers use job application forms as a means to discover new employees. Using these forms gives employers a better way of narrowing down the best applicants for employment. It’s a great way to qualify applicants quickly and efficiently.
Simply add a file upload field to your job application form and you can get resumes right on your website. These file upload fields let you accept job applications or other documents, right on your website through your forms. So you can gather and organize resumes, references, and other docs before even reaching out to candidates. Also, you can ask for the candidate’s name, email, and phone number on this form. You can even request certain information that is not always included on resumes and CVs on your job application form.
Donation Form:
A donation form is a key tool you use to collect information to process a donation. It meant to make the donation process as smooth and simple as possible. Just like with order and payment forms, your customer’s information should be safely secured in an organized database. That information can be your gateway to offering them more opportunities such as event invites and other donations they can place in the future.
Donation forms should be straightforward. If your donation form is straightforward and user-friendly, your donors will likely have a great giving experience. Everything on your donation form must have a purpose in completing the financial transaction and capturing any pertinent donor data.
A chaotic form will just leave you with a bunch of frustrated would-be donors. And it definitely won’t do much to convert your current donors into lifelong friends of your organization. Any extra questions you’d like to ask your donors, such as their preferred communication preferences and philanthropic affinities, should be left until after the donation is processed. To create one without any hassle, check How To Create A Donation Form for your WordPress Website.
Event Registration Form:
No matter what kind of website you run, you’ll probably want to organize an event of some kind sooner. The actual event could be anything like a fundraiser, online webinar, tournament, live raffle, or even a community meet-up. Even though you have put a great deal of thought, time, and exertion into arranging your event, it’s time to come up with an online form that focused on dealing with your attendees. It should effortlessly convey event-specific information like time, venue, event schedule, etc.
Putting on an event can be a challenging task, but with an online form focused on managing your attendees, you easily deliver event-specific information such as rationale and basic details. If you have a better form design, better are the chances to increase attendee registration. So, building an effective event registration form is important and you need a good form design that keeps registrants moving towards the ‘Submit’ button without much thought or effort.
Support Request Form:
Do you want to serve better support your customers? When your customers are already using your product or service, they may have technical questions very often. It will be a long process to search for a contact email address and inform you about their problem. To shorten that process, all you need to do is using this support request form. It’s much easier for your customer to send a request using an online form rather than search for a contact email address.
A support form allows your customers to send a specific request that generates a ticket or sends an email to your ticketing system. You can direct different problems to a different department if you have them. Customers can get a quick return receipt that helps them feel that someone will respond soon. So, if you’re looking for ways to make your audience a bit happier, placing one will bring a lot of conveniences.
Final Thought:
In this article, we learned how different types of forms help our business to grow. But that’s not the end, you need to use a powerful form builder for building those forms. Live Forms is one of the best form builders in the market out there that can Meet All Your Needs. Its multi-column form feature will take your form-building experience to another level. Check this article and get a complete tutorial on How to Create a Multi-Column Form with WordPress Live Forms. To know more about Live Forms and some other form builder plugins, check this article, 5 Best Form Builder Plugins for WordPress ( 2021 ).
Hope this list of common web forms will help you to grow your business. Share your thoughts in the comment section below. We appreciate further comments, support, or suggestions!
Web forms are one of the must-haves for a WordPress website. At the same time, they are one of the most underestimated elements of a website. Most owners don’t realize that properly designed web forms could be the difference between success and abject failure.
Whether your site’s purpose is about traveling, entertainment, informing, persuading, or marketing, you must have to interact with your website visitors to know their stance, draw their attention to drive them to the action that you want them to do. If you want to interact with your website visitors efficiently, website forms come first to the spot. A form is one of the best ways to get input from prospective clients and indirectly establish a cordial relation with them.
Probably you already have a basic WordPress contact form on your WordPress website, also a form builder plugin. But do you know the number of different ways you can use this form builder other than your contact form? Wondering what are the different types of WordPress forms you can use and why need them?
You might be surprised to learn how many different types of forms you can add to websites. So if you’re looking to boost your website’s success, check out all these different kinds of WordPress forms to grow your business. Below are some of the different online forms you can use for your website, along with some tips you should know to make sure you’re doing it right.
Tips for Styling Web Forms:
Before going to discuss what type of forms you need on your website, you should learn some tips for styling your forms. While creating a form with a WordPress Form Plugin you should consider the following best practices:
Types of Forms Every WordPress Website Need:
Most website owners don’t give attention to web forms. But they can be a game-changer for your business. Here are some common types of web forms which can help you in growing your business.
Contact Form:
Contact form is the most basic form that every website needs. I would say it’s a mandatory form for every website. A simple contact form is the first step for your customers to easily reach you without spammers skimming your email address.
With a contact form, you can ask users for certain details, such as their name, contact information, and order number. They may also have a drop-down or text-entry field for leads to explain their reason for reaching out and their preferred method of contact. How To Create A Contact Form In WordPress? is the easiest tutorial on creating a contact form. You can check that tutorial if you don’t know how to create one.
Why use a contact form? Contact forms are used for leads to ask your business a question, voice a concern or even explain their need for a refund. To know more about why you need a contact form on your website, I request you to check this article. It will clear out all of your confusion regarding why you need a contact form.
User Registration Form:
A user registration form is a form located on a web page making it possible for someone to fill it out and begin the opt-in subscription process. A user would complete a registration form if they were interested in your service. It’s a subscription box you can add to your site, blog, or social page to collect new email subscribers. User registration form builds high-value email lists.
With a user registration form, you can ask for personal information in exchange for accessing content or services. Designers have to figure out a way to encourage people to fill registration forms out. Before asking them for any information, it is very important to provide them a reason why they should register. In other words, sum up the benefits of registering with your site in 1 or 2 sentences at most.
If you’re a business that requires membership, you can also utilize this form. It doesn’t put pressure on your customers to commit right away. You can always send them marketing communications in the future to drive them towards a purchase decision.
Lastly, e-commerce websites also rely heavily on user registration forms because they’re a mandatory step before any purchase, which is why we’ll cover those aspects as well. If a lead was looking to list an item on one of these sites, they would complete a registration form to create an account and then post the item. Take an example of any of the Social Media websites, users can’t get engaged with these platforms unless they create an account.
The best place to add an email signup form is somewhere prominent on your website, like your sidebar. To generate maximum signups, you have to minimize the steps involved in registering, and at the same time, make the most of the few elements you do use. When you create a registration option specific, you know signups are definitely interested in receiving your content, via email! No need for asking the user to re-type their email address or password!
User Login Form:
A user login form is also a type of WordPress sign-in form on your website that allows previously registered users to sign in with their credentials to access. It is a door that users must open to get the best out of their user experience with a website. It is the starting point of navigating a website in a personalized manner. By creating an account on a website, a user gets to customize some aspects of experience with the site and get access to membership benefits.
The User login form contains a field for the username and another for the password. When the login form is submitted its underlying code checks that the credentials are authentic, giving the user can access to the restricted page. If a user is unable to provide authentic credentials they will not be able to proceed past the login form.
In that case, it would be a hassle to contact support just because users don’t remember their passwords. This is the reason why you’ll have to implement a ‘Forgot your password?’ function on the login screen. When users click it, they should receive a link in their email that lets them change their credentials and log in to the website without further issues.
To reduce the number of people who request to change their passwords because they forgot them, it would be best to add a ‘Remember me’ option at the end of the login form. Once checked, this option saves the credentials, and each time that person accesses the page, their email and password will pop up in the form, or they will show up as already logged in. Check How To Create A Custom User Login Form in WordPress Website? to create your website’s custom user login form.
Newsletter Signup Form:
When we talk about newsletter signup, we’re referring to a process by which visitors elect to receive updates from an online business through email. Newsletter signup is a core component of every successful email marketing strategy. Since online businesses can’t establish bonds as brick-and-mortar stores do, they need a reliable channel to engage with their target audience and incentivize them to buy their products.
You never know the people visiting your website today, will ever come back again or not. A newsletter is a great way to convert one-time visitors into repeat visitors. Starting an email newsletter will allow you to bring them back to your website, and convert them into customers. Once they join the newsletter, you will be able to stay in touch and bring them back to your website.
Newsletter signup forms are quite simplistic, only ever requiring one or two fields for users to submit. Visitors can only enter their email addresses and hit subscribe. Try to place your newsletter signup form on the page a customer visits the most. If they came across your website’s blog using a keyword search, you can add the newsletter signup form as part of your CTA. At the same time, if they just purchased a product from you, you can include it during the ordering process or confirmation email.
Online Order Form:
Online order forms do exactly what it sounds like, they allow your website visitors to place orders. If you’re selling products or services online, you probably want to focus more on fulfilling your orders rather than the process of collecting them. Including an online order form on your WordPress website, give your prospects the choice to buy at their convenience.
Online order forms help customers easily place their orders whether they’re using desktops or mobile devices and provide you with sufficient information about the order to fulfill it quickly and efficiently. Order forms should be detailed and may include credit card, shipping, and billing information, and your contact information. So, they also provide customers with a way to pay for items and have the products they have ordered sent directly to them. That’s why having a website order form is essential for a growing business.
Customer Feedback Form:
Customer feedback plays a wonderful role in improving your business by letting you modify your approach based on their opinion. It helps improve product development, marketing, operations and so much more. The best option to make sure you can fully understand your product or service marketplace is to obtain qualitative and honest customer feedback. However, it’s one of the most important aspects of running a business that often gets overlooked.
So how can you be sure your customer service strategies are working? How do you know if your customers are happy with their experiences in your company? What do they like and dislike about your products or services? And more importantly, how can you best keep up with their ever-changing requirements?
The most important way of fully understanding a customer’s perception of your brand is by asking them directly, and the best way to simply hear the voice of your customer is through their own feedback. This is where you need a customer feedback form. When there is a good custom design form, users tend to give information and it is useful in deciding your business’s next steps in performance assessment. Even if just a few people care to respond, you’ll already get a better idea of which step might be the bottleneck for higher conversions.
Job Application Form:
A job application form is part of the formal hiring process where an official form is given to the prospective candidate to drop their resumes. Using this simple form prospective employees can apply for a job easily.
Employers use job application forms as a means to discover new employees. Using these forms gives employers a better way of narrowing down the best applicants for employment. It’s a great way to qualify applicants quickly and efficiently.
Simply add a file upload field to your job application form and you can get resumes right on your website. These file upload fields let you accept job applications or other documents, right on your website through your forms. So you can gather and organize resumes, references, and other docs before even reaching out to candidates. Also, you can ask for the candidate’s name, email, and phone number on this form. You can even request certain information that is not always included on resumes and CVs on your job application form.
Donation Form:
A donation form is a key tool you use to collect information to process a donation. It meant to make the donation process as smooth and simple as possible. Just like with order and payment forms, your customer’s information should be safely secured in an organized database. That information can be your gateway to offering them more opportunities such as event invites and other donations they can place in the future.
Donation forms should be straightforward. If your donation form is straightforward and user-friendly, your donors will likely have a great giving experience. Everything on your donation form must have a purpose in completing the financial transaction and capturing any pertinent donor data.
A chaotic form will just leave you with a bunch of frustrated would-be donors. And it definitely won’t do much to convert your current donors into lifelong friends of your organization. Any extra questions you’d like to ask your donors, such as their preferred communication preferences and philanthropic affinities, should be left until after the donation is processed. To create one without any hassle, check How To Create A Donation Form for your WordPress Website.
Event Registration Form:
No matter what kind of website you run, you’ll probably want to organize an event of some kind sooner. The actual event could be anything like a fundraiser, online webinar, tournament, live raffle, or even a community meet-up. Even though you have put a great deal of thought, time, and exertion into arranging your event, it’s time to come up with an online form that focused on dealing with your attendees. It should effortlessly convey event-specific information like time, venue, event schedule, etc.
Putting on an event can be a challenging task, but with an online form focused on managing your attendees, you easily deliver event-specific information such as rationale and basic details. If you have a better form design, better are the chances to increase attendee registration. So, building an effective event registration form is important and you need a good form design that keeps registrants moving towards the ‘Submit’ button without much thought or effort.
Support Request Form:
Do you want to serve better support your customers? When your customers are already using your product or service, they may have technical questions very often. It will be a long process to search for a contact email address and inform you about their problem. To shorten that process, all you need to do is using this support request form. It’s much easier for your customer to send a request using an online form rather than search for a contact email address.
A support form allows your customers to send a specific request that generates a ticket or sends an email to your ticketing system. You can direct different problems to a different department if you have them. Customers can get a quick return receipt that helps them feel that someone will respond soon. So, if you’re looking for ways to make your audience a bit happier, placing one will bring a lot of conveniences.
Final Thought:
In this article, we learned how different types of forms help our business to grow. But that’s not the end, you need to use a powerful form builder for building those forms. Live Forms is one of the best form builders in the market out there that can Meet All Your Needs. Its multi-column form feature will take your form-building experience to another level. Check this article and get a complete tutorial on How to Create a Multi-Column Form with WordPress Live Forms. To know more about Live Forms and some other form builder plugins, check this article, 5 Best Form Builder Plugins for WordPress ( 2021 ).
Hope this list of common web forms will help you to grow your business. Share your thoughts in the comment section below. We appreciate further comments, support, or suggestions!
Sidratul Sohrat
I am Sidratul Sohrat, a dedicated content writer with a fervent passion for creating engaging and informative content related to technology, business, and marketing.