Overview of Gravity Forms Form Creator

This video gives you a general overview of Gravity Forms along with some very helpful (and important) tips.

Modified Transcript of Video

Please Note: This transcript as been modified to remove only text that isn’t relevant to the overview itself (like ums, saying hi, thank you for watching, and cleaning up text to make more sense in written form.)

In this video, we’re going to do an overview of gravity forms, which is the form creator that you have installed on your website. In most cases, I do have a few clients who don’t use this for their forms, but the majority of people do.

If you’re in the back end of your site, you will see the icon shown in the video or you can check in your Installed Plugins list. We use gravity forms for building any kind of form. They are about to do a pretty large update and this may impact what you see and what options are available so I want to give you a heads up on that.

If you’re ready to create a new form, you’re going to want to go to forms in the left-hand sidebar, and then you can add from the side, this new form option you can add from here, you can add from here, new form or here new form. So there’s a lot of different options, which is one of the things that I really love about WordPress. The challenge is that if you start playing with all of those, it can be hard to remember where to go because you don’t really get in the groove, but I just want you to know that they’re all there and you’ll find a rhythm that works for you. You’ll find one of those probably that works best for you.

We’re going to go ahead and click on, add new right here. And we’re going to give the form a title. I do recommend filling in a short description about what the form is being used for that way. If you’re ever needing to clean them up…if you have a growing list of forms and you don’t know which one is, which can be kind of challenging, that just helps. And it doesn’t take very long to do that.

Once you’ve done that, you’re going to end up in the create/edit space for the form. You can see the name of your form, and you can see the ID number, and then you have a few options and it’s telling you that you haven’t done anything yet and you need to get started.

We have a few different options for fields here. The standard fields are any type of field that can be modified you want to use in your form. Advanced fields are for some things that are commonly used in your forms such as name, address, email website, etc. and that way you don’t have to do as much formatting. You can plop that in, make a couple of tweaks and you’re good to go. The posts fields relate to blogging posts and putting different pieces of that into your form. I will tell you that I don’t have any clients who have ever used this. So I’m not going to spend much time on that, but it will be included in some of the documentation that I’ll be attaching with this video so you can review that if it’s something you think you might want to use pricing fields or the last section, and these are necessary.

Always remember to update or cancel if you don’t like the changes you’ve made and you want to get out of there or you can move the form to trash if it’s no longer needed

I’m going to attach documentation to cover more about these fields, but for now, I’m just giving an overview. So we’re going to move on to the setting section. As you can see, there are multiple sections here and yours may or may not look exactly like this. It really depends on what you have active for the forms that you’ve used so far, or the forms that you know, you’re going to be creating and you’ve chosen to activate some other things.

So the form settings really relate to the name, the description, how you want it to be laid out. One suggestion I have here is to put the description above the inputs it’s on below by default. And I just don’t think that’s very intuitive. Usually, you see a name of a field and then what you’re supposed to do with that field and then the field, if there’s a description. So that is one change I always recommend making. You can change what your button says by default. You can enable some other features if you want, and these will be covered in the documentation…entry limits, save and continue scheduling the form. Those are some things that are very commonly used, not necessarily with a simple form, but, if you’re taking registration for something or you have time today to get your form set up, but you don’t want it to be live until a certain date, and then you want it to disappear after a certain date. That’s a nice feature. If they have a lot of fields that you want people to feel out, fill out the saving, continue can be a nice feature as well so that they don’t have to sit and do it all at once.

Confirmations are what they get after they fill out your form. So by default, they’re just going to get this message. “Thanks for contacting us. We will get in touch with you shortly.” I feel like that isn’t very personable and so minimally, I do recommend you update that text so that it sounds more like you and your brand. You also have a couple of other options here, but I do find the most common one that people are using is just changing the confirmation text. The second most common one is the page and the third one, I don’t have anyone who uses that but you can redirect to a specific page that may not be on your website. It is important to personalize this for branding reasons.

Notifications are the next section, and this is a really, really important one. So I’m going to go over a few details here. Notifications are what you get after someone fills out the form. So if they’re filling out a contact form or something like that, these get emailed to you. It’s really important that you come in here and take care of the personalization. You can also do different notifications that go to different people if you need to.

The first thing that you absolutely want to remember to do is that nowhere in here, should it say “admin email”, that’s going to go to your webmaster because they are the one taking care of all of the backend details and need to know if there’s a problem with your website. So if they aren’t the admin for the website, then they don’t get those notifications. So you want to change this to something of your own, where do you want this email to be sent? You can type in that email address.

In the from field, I usually use the person who’s sending it, and you can grab that by clicking on the merge tag option and scrolling down and looking for their name. Now, I didn’t complete this form, so it isn’t in here, but typically you would have a name field, and you could just click on that. Whatever you click on is what’s going to show up in that field. So I would use the merge tag to add their name.

The from email address also should not be admin email. And this is usually what either the person who emailed you, their email address, or yours. So here’s a really important note about this from field. Never rely on emails from these forms ending up in your inbox. You should come on your site regularly and check to make sure there aren’t any that you’ve missed because it’s technology. And there are issues with mail deliverability if this doesn’t match your website, it can cause problems with delivering. So what I will do frequently is just do webmaster@yourdomain.com or you can use noreply@yourdomain.com. Even though there isn’t actually an email address that says that it’s all this is, is what’s going to show up in the email for you, but this way it looks like it came from this website and you’re going to have fewer problems with deliverability.

The reply to you would want this to be whoever sent you the email, and you can use those merge tags again, to find their email address and have it feeling automatically and blind copy is for if you want someone else to get this notification, you can make sure that they do that by either typing in something or using the merge code.

The other thing that I like to do here is add on your website name. This is just helpful because if for some reason it ends up in my inbox, I know who it belongs to. Occasionally people will forget to take out that admin email and they’ll come to me and then I can get it delivered to you right away and let you know that there’s a problem with the form on your website as well. And you can update that. So I always add that.

And then this part here is the message. And using the merge tags over here, you can decide what information you want to be included in the email that comes to you. So this is just the notification that you’re getting in your email and it’s pulling from whatever somebody submitted on the form. So all fields is usually where I leave it. If there is some sensitive information like credit card numbers, um, in some cases there might be their message might be sensitive. So I just try to be careful about transmitting that information through email and I might pick and choose, but most of the time all fields works perfectly and it’s, what’s in here by default. The last thing I do is update that notification so that all of my changes are accepted. We’re just going to do sandbox. This is probably, next to creating your form, the most important part of creating a form is making sure that your notifications are set up properly so that they go to the right people.

These other options relate to GDPR and the handling of data, both of these. And so you’ll want to set these up in a format that works for you and relates to your terms of service that you have. This is a legal piece so I can’t fully advise you on it other than to tell you that if somebody says, “Hey, I want you to delete all my information from your website,” you to do it. And if you want to handle some of that automatically, where you’re not keeping things on your website for an indefinite period of time, you definitely want to enable the expiration so that it will do it automatically for you. I highly recommend this, not just for privacy, but also for server space and performance of your website.

The entries is a place where you can see all of the entries that have been done on this form. You can also see them over here in the left-hand sidebar, under entries, clicking on that will show you all the entries and you can click, you can click and view different forms, right from this space, if you want to.

The last one is a preview, but know that when you hit the preview button, you can get a general idea of the field and make sure you don’t have spelling errors or things like that but this is not going to look like this on your website. It’s going to take on some of your theme settings so that it fits better with your website itself. This is really more about checking your fields and making sure that you have all the content and maybe testing the form. You can test it from here as well, make sure the notifications go to the right place, everything works.

So that’s generally how the forums work. The last thing though that I want to share is these add-ons. These are included in your package and if you have something like MailChimp, MailerLite Convert Kit, some sort of email marketing campaign, or some CRM some payment options, anything that’s in here is eligible for you to use. So if you need a more advanced form that you want to create yourself, and you see something in here that works, it’s available for you to use. And it’ll just give you some extra options in creating your form.

If you want to take payments with your forms, you have to have a payment gateway attached. That’s where Stripe or PayPal or square are going to come in. Know that they’re there and available for you to use freely.

The last thing I want to say about forms is, to be viewable to the public, they have to be put on a page. You would create a new page for your form, and let’s just call this testing form and we’re going to launch Beaver Builder. That is my preferred layout. And then under modules, you’re going to put in gravity because that’s going to show you your options. And for this one, we just have this one here. It’s going to ask you if you want to title. I generally don’t put in a title because I’m going to do that on the page so that it looks better. I select the form that I need. I can choose whether or not I want these to display. It depends on what they are….sometimes I prefer to type them in so I have more control over how they look. And then you’re going to save. We click on publish. This form doesn’t have any fields so that’s why it looks like this, but, and it’ll show up here.

The page is what you would give people access to fill out the form. That’s the link that you would use.

More detail will be available in the documentation that comes along with this as an overview with some really important, helpful hints.