Gravity Forms WordPress Plugin Review

There are a variety of ways to create forms on your self-hosted WordPress blog, but the Gravity Forms WordPress plugin is one of the better options. This is a premium WordPress plugin, so it does have a price tag, but if you use forms a lot or need to create one really reliable form, Gravity Forms can do it very well.

Gravity Forms allows you to create simple or advanced forms that you can publish anywhere on your WordPress blog and easily receive responses that you can edit, publish, or delete if necessary. You simply create your forms using an easy drag-and-drop tool within your WordPress dashboard, select who should be notified via email when responses are submitted, and then review and respond to those entries as you see fit. You can even set up your forms to send automatic responses to people. You can see an example of a form created with Gravity Forms on Women on Business.

You easily create forms and receive submissions with Gravity Forms, but what makes Gravity Forms so good is how much you can do with those forms and submissions. Here are some highlights of the features Gravity Forms offers:

• Create multi-page forms with a progress completion bar.
• Configure the form title, description, confirmation message, and settings such as the number of entries allowed which is great for blog contests.
• Use advanced form fields to schedule your form to be published for a limited time only (again, great for blog contests), capturing names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, URLs, file uploads, and more.
• Choose from text fields, paragraph fields, drop-down fields, checkbox fields, radio button fields, and more.
• Add pricing fields to create an order form that includes items, quantities, shipping details, donations, and calculates totals based on the selections users make in the form.
• Include post fields to accept guest posts on your blog that can include post titles, post body text, categories, tags, images, an excerpt, and more.
• Leverage the conditional logic built into Gravity Forms to show or hide fields, pages, the submit button, and more based on a user's selections.
• Set fields to be required or optional, and easily change field length.
• Create custom auto-generated messages when fields aren't completed that are required.
• Manage entries directly from your WordPress dashboard.
• Set up notifications to your email address when entries are submitted.
• Create personal notifications when you respond to form submissions from within your WordPress dashboard.
• Merge field data into email notifications to users.
• Use the form widget add-on to add a form to your blog's sidebar.
• Create a form to enable visitors to your blog to register as a user on your WordPress site, which enables them to easily publish their own posts on your blog.

Gravity Forms is a great WordPress plugin, but it does have a price tag that is higher than some similar premium WordPress plugins. Also, many useful features are only available as add-ons with additional price tags. You can purchase a Personal license that allows you to use Gravity Forms on a single site, or you can purchase a Business license and use it on up to four sites. The Business license also includes some of the add-on features listed above. A Developer license is the most expensive but gives you access even more features and add-ons and can be used on an unlimited number of sites.

Licenses must be renewed annually in order to continue receiving automatic updates and support. An online support forum is also available, but a quick Google search will reveal that many users are not happy about the lack of support they receive from Gravity Forms. You can follow the link to read a review by a customer who was disappointed by the lack of support offered by Gravity Forms.

With that said, Gravity Forms is a good choice if you need customizable or advanced forms. For example, if you want to allow people to submit guest posts to your blog, you can do so with Gravity Forms. Just create your form, publish it on your blog, and set it up so you receive notifications when new posts are submitted. You can review those posts, edit them if you need to, and publish them at your convenience. It's very easy!

If you're just looking for a very simple contact form, then a free WordPress plugin is likely to be good enough for your purposes. Also, it's important to keep in mind that there are other premium WordPress form plugins that offer extremely similar features to Gravity Forms but have much lower price tags. For example, Gravity Forms has a high annual subscription fee while Formidable Pro, a very similar premium plugin, has a one-time purchase price as well as a free license with limited features.