WPForms Review & Tutorial: Create a Simple WordPress Contact Form (Pro License Giveaway)

thank you so much for watching the press Avenue YouTube channel my name is John and I just want to thank everyone who subscribed to our channel so far we've tipped over a thousand subscribers and we love interacting with you on the comments on facebook and on our site as well so again thank you so much for subscribing I just love the feedback today we're talking about WP forms so if you go to let's go over here WP forms comm is a drag-and-drop WordPress form builder that we've actually been wanting to try out they did contact us and say hey would you do a video on this and send us a license as well to check out all the features so thank you to WP forms for doing that and it's been something I've been wanting to check out for a while now I first did try it when they first hit the scene but haven't really taken a hard look at it until recently I have a ton of experience with gravity forms from building applications to quote builders and then just simple forms as well so I'm excited to kind of dive into this one as well and see how it compares or doesn't compare features drag-and-drop form builder WordPress is drag-and-drop everything lately they do templates which is great conditional logic mobile-friendly lets see notifications you can look at entries multi-page form user registration again you can go to their site and read it but a lot of these I'm excited about the stripe add-on I love MailChimp a trip out on I'm excited to try as a peer or zapier surveys signatures they really do it all compared to some of the ones that have been on the scene for a while so what we're gonna do is go ahead and install it and then take a look at it so we're gonna head over to our WordPress site alright we've gone ahead and installed WP forms by going to add new upload then I've ditional II have gone to the settings and entered a license key I don't wanna show that part as I don't want to trip up and then have it exposed to the whole world you understand but so here we are under plugins and it says WP forms again this is the pro version I'm just going to head over to settings before I dive into the forms area so license key there thank you for that um under stealing you can do basic forms and theme styling you can do base styling or no styling which I really like oops we're gonna leave it as is you can load assets globally they do have a gdpr checkbox and you can read about that they're going further in email you can choose your templates for the email do you wanna HTML or plain text which is really nice because you can globally impact all email notifications the header image you can put your logo and it also says a recommended size so what I've seen so far of this plug-in is they really do help you along so instead of just saying header image you can see the size and tells you to make it small for other devices so I do think this is very good helpful cues throughout the plug-in background color theme and then carbon copy if you want to CC check this if you like to enable the building to CC I've got the CAPTCHA so you can enable checkbox or invisible and then put in your keys and again they have a walk through step by step instruction validation so these are just different things that I will say so payment is required this field is required if you want to change any of that you can do that here they have a payments area to select your currency the integrations area has content Constant Contact integrated but I recommend MailChimp and if you're gonna start anywhere and then miscellaneous oh you can hide announcements so one thing that drives me nuts about any plug-in paid or free is the announcements now I realize free ones is how you drive people to a premium but some people take it too far and then it works me even more when I do pay for a plug-in and I see announcements all day long on XYZ products so I do like that you can turn this off and that you have that option and then finally when you uninstall this you can check this to remove all data upon the I like this as well and the reason is sometimes you need to manually update a plug-in so if this is not checked I could then delete WP forms manually update it and all my stuff still remains without worrying about the loss of data if I do ultimately want to get rid of it I can check this box and click save and delete it alright enough of that let's get into the forms area so we're gonna go to all forms and we're gonna go to add new and it loads this whole new interface over the top of WordPress it's super clean I really like it and it just starts us at the top and a form name we're gonna do a contact us now again what I like about WP forms is they have these templates built-in so you can see it here and so they do have a simple contact form they do have a request quote form newsletter billing donation and suggestion but I'm just gonna start with blank form and feel it out and see how it works so go with blank loading alright so it says contact us and add a field so we're going to get somebody's name to start so you simply just click it and it adds it in there I can also drag it oh that's great so it's drag-and-drop or it's click and add so get their name and their phone so under fancy fields I'll click phone and then I'll click email and then we'll add a checkbox and then we'll add let's see you want to hang this up here well add an additional we'll do a multiple-choice and a paragraph so start up here at name so you do a label you can pick the format simple first and last simple just one plain line first last first middle and last I sometimes do first and last or I just keep it that simple and then you have Advanced Options you can choose the field size placeholders hide the labels and then additional classes and this part I love in that with other plugins like gravity forms you have to go find the class or memorize the class and this one I can say I would like this name field to be in a column and you simply click it choose which side of the column you want and it adds the class for you which is genius I don't want a class currently so I'm going to turn that off and then lastly conditionals conditional logic logic means if they say check this first choice checkbox then show them this field or hide this field so this is excellent when using applications or doing a quote form or grabbing additional information from people that you may or may not need so ok so name we're gonna leave out that checkbox is how would you like to be contacted so we will say phone text email and I'll use a description please check all that apply so please check all that apply so one thing I would love to see is if I could push the police check all to apply up here I'm just because I long-form checkbox content people may or may not see that it might be under here it's bear with me it is not or I'm not seeing it quickly all right phone to make something required you just check required it puts that little star and they're smart format decides on what region they're on on so if you're in the US it'll put a 1 I believe and you can read more about that I'll put a link in the description next email field you can enable an email confirmation if you want you just check this box and it adds it right there so I'll leave it at that multiple choice say subscribe to our newsletter I'll say yes no and then I can delete one of these easily and then I can automatically check yes as the default and if they don't want it they can click to click no um so I think that's absolutely great another thing they allow is images I can say yes and put a gif for something that's 200 by 200 pixels well this says the same size 250 by 250 and then the place holder says 200 by 125 it is what it is and then paragraph text I'll say leave a comment I don't think this required all right so there's my simple form and I'll go ahead and hit save if you click on bed which is right next to it it simply gives you the short code and again WP forms jumps in and says hey this is how you use our embedded feature in Guttenberg or the WordPress 5.0 editor again this is really great and welcomed for new users because a lot of new users jump into this stuff and it gets confusing on where things are so again props to WP forms well what we're gonna do is go over to settings and to show you a little bit more of the backend of this so we have name description we can add a CSS class so a style class the submit it can say submit you can say submit your comment there's the processing text so it says sending and then you can add a class styling class to the button you can enable an anti-spam honeypot you can enable dynamic fields population and you can disable storing information in WordPress so if you don't to store this information because of either Gd P R or some other law or you just simply don't want to store it want to have the email and be done with it you would check that box so go ahead and hit save next is notifications how do you want to be notified so the admin email is under the WordPress back-end under settings whatever admin email is there will be sent this will be sent to that admin it'll say new entry from contact us it'll be from press Avenue and from the email and then I'll include all the fields other things you can include is the show smart tanks so you can say from and you can put in their name email and I select this and it shows me the tags that are available which are essentially the form fields love that again great so far hit save and then finally the confirmation message so this is just a message to the user after they submit the form that says thanks for contacting us we'll be in touch shortly additionally you can show them a page so you can select a page we don't have any pages on here really or you can redirect them so you can redirect them to it just a whole nother site it could be Facebook it can be Google whatever you want you just enter it in here and then hit save also you can add additional confirmations so we can show them a message here and then you can add additional stuff so they get a message and then wonder how this works if you do two at the same time we'll have to test this later these other ones that are grayed out are pro add-ons that I haven't installed yet so they have conversational forms surveys form pages which is a multi-page form a locker which is you fill out the form and then behind it you get an incentive like an e-book or an interview etc form abandonment which collects information before they even submit the form which is great and then post submissions which will allow guest posting submissions and kind of take the headache out of that process so next we'll go to marketing says you haven't saved that's fine Constant Contact inches the default I despise constant contact every time I use it it drives me insane but that is the default one that is installed unless you get an add-on for one of these other ones MailChimp is my preferred and I'll make a separate video on that finally under payments you have PayPal standard which again is an add-on or stripe I prefer stripe if if it's at all possible and that's again on the add-ons page so that's it here we'll hit save and close out so you can see there is our contact form we can see the entries we can preview the form there it is without any styling really I can duplicate it which I love that this is here and additionally I can delete it again they show the shortcode when it was created and how many entries are here so what we're gonna do is go over to posts and add a new post again we're using WordPress 5.0 and we do a beaver builder installed but we're not going to use it in this but I can show you it as well so here's beaver builder we're gonna use the standard editor which is Guttenberg or the WordPress 5.0 editor so one thing I noticed right of the gate is here's the WordPress editor and we have the WP forms button here we have add a shortcode that we have image so I'll just click the forms and there's the little bear saying hi I'll click contact us there it is couldn't really be easier if I go to Plus same thing and just search WP forms there it is select a form so now we've added it twice let's get rid of this one alright now go ahead and go to preview and again this sites pretty stripped down it's really just to show you guys different things within WordPress without impacting a live site like pres Avenue com so there we always have our title who posted it and then we have name here's what a check box looks like the phone number there it is and I can select the country so it's like to do United States for me and then has the other ones in here with flags which i think is a great way to identify things once you get way down on this list um so I think that's absolutely great email so you can put your email in here alright so it knows buying phone numbers not valid for the country I selected so that's great email subscribe to newsletter yes or no comment and then submit your comment so that's kind of the basis overview of WP forms again I really like what I see so far it really does have an excellent set up and also they really do walk you through the whole process one thing I just noticed is right here WP forms total entries they have a kind of graph looks like a little Google Analytics thing right here one thing I don't like is the recommended plugin a monster insights installer learn more so I have that hide hide announcements off I believe let me double check oh no it's not off so I hit say and let's see if that disappears no so it's still there so stuff like that that I don't care for especially on a paid plugin but it is what it is and I know they need to mark it so it might just be my personal preference so that's it for WP forms again really do like it a lot and thank you to them if you have any questions about WP forms please leave them in the comments below additionally if this was helpful in any way I'd love a thumbs up and lastly go ahead and click that red subscribe button to see more wordpress tutorials like this and that really wasn't lastly lastly we have a Facebook group the wordpress tutorials and community group which will allow us to post more updates welcome people we do think something called WordPress Wednesday where you can show off your WordPress sites to the world and answer any questions that you may have thanks for watching again for watching the press Avenue YouTube channel right below me is a circle that will help you subscribe to the channel quickly next to it the square will bring you to our site additionally to the right over here there is a recent upload whatever the most recent one is at the time and also a you to recommended video in our playlist thanks