How to Add Web Forms for a WordPress Site Using Plugins

By Lisa Sabin-Wilson from WordPress Web Design For Dummies

Some website owners need a way for visitors to provide them information through forms, such as order forms, customer surveys, or readership data collection. Examples of forms you can build include:

Order forms: Collect the information you need from customers by creating an order form with the necessary fields, such as this one, which allows customers to receive a project quote from this company by filling in different types of fields (such as their budget and site specifications).
Surveys: Build a form that asks customers to review your product or services, or provide testimonials for your business.
Lead generation forms: Build a form to display to collect information on your readership and customer base.

The following two plugins to highly recommended, if you need to create a form for a website: Contact Form 7 (available on the Plugin Directory page) and Gravity Forms (a commercial plugin).

Contact Form 7

The Contact Form 7 plugin provides a quick and easy way to include a simple e-mail contact form on your site. This plugin is freely available from the Plugin Directory page and can be installed from your Dashboard. After installing and activating Contact Form on your web site, click Contact to go to an option page where you can build your contact form and get the short code you need:

[contact-form 1 "Contact form 1"]

Copy that short code and then add it into any page where you want to display the contact form on your site. You can even paste the code into a text widget to include the form in your sidebar.

Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms is a commercially available plugin for WordPress that's provides several tools to help you build different types of forms.

Features of Gravity Forms include

An easy-to-use, click-and-add form builder — no need to know, or even understand, any HTML, CSS, or PHP code. The form fields are all ready for you to simply click and add to your new form — no HTML, PHP, or CSS required because it’s all done for you.
Multiple e-mail routing that allows you to not only have the form results e-mailed to you, but also designate multiple e-mail addresses the form should be delivered to.
Conditional form fields that allow you to build forms that are intuitive. You can show or hide a form field based on the value the user enters in previous fields within the form.
Form scheduling that’s helpful if you have a form that you want to make available only during a certain, pre-defined time period.
Form limits that allow you to limit the number of times the form can be filled out before it’s deactivated. This is helpful if you’re running a time-sensitive contest, for example, where the first 25 people to fill out the form get a special prize. The form is then deactivated after it’s been filled out by 25 people.
Dashboard management that allows you to view and respond to the results of the form from a designated page within your WordPress Dashboard.
Easily embed a form within a page (or post) on your web site through the Gravity Forms icon added to the Edit Page, and Edit Post, editors. Click the icon and choose the form you want to embed, and then WordPress enters the correct short code for the display of the form on your site.
Integration with MailChimp, a very popular provider for e-newsletters that many businesses and individuals use. Gravity Forms makes a MailChimp add-on available to allow your site visitors to easily subscribe to your e-newsletter when they fill out forms on your web site.