I’ve been using Gravity Forms for a long time now (roughly 2 years at the time of writing). It has become the only contact form plugin that I will use on either my own websites or on client websites.
The Gravity Forms plugin is packed full of features, but this article explains the reasons why I like it. This is not really a full Gravity Forms review, more of a highlight of the aspects that make it useful to me. Hopefully this article gives you some ideas of what you can do with the plugin that you’ve not already thought of!
1) Massive Time Savings
Creating potentially very sophisticated forms takes a few minutes using Gravity Forms. If you are technical, it’d take a few hours to do it properly in PHP. So using the plugin saves valuable time, and it’s less error prone.
2) Backup Form Submissions
When a website visitor submits a form, any successful submissions are stored in admin area. This means you can download the form submissions as a CSV (comma-separated values) file.
Once you have the CSV file, you can import the entries into a spreadsheet for doing detailed analysis. So in addition to getting a backup of all form submissions (in case you don’t receive a notification email), you can do some statistical work on submissions too.
3) Easy-peasy Post Creation
With the correct fields, Gravity Forms can create posts directly, including setting featured images and setting the post category. This is perfect if you have a directory-type website where each post is a profile of a person or business, and users can submit their details via a form.
If you really want to get nifty, Gravity Forms can also create Custom Post Types and work with Custom Taxonomies if you use this free 3rd-party plugin.
4) You can accept Paypal payments
If you opt for the developer licence of Gravity Forms, you also get the Paypal AddOn. The Paypal AddOn allows you to accept a payment as part of the form submission process, either like a booking form or a pseudo-shopping cart. If you have a custom booking process on your website, then Gravity Forms makes it really to accept a payment via Paypal too.
You could even use the Paypal support for a paid support request, as payment can be taken along with accepting the support question and contact details.
5) Easy mailing list support with MailChimp
Since Gravity Forms works nicely with MailChimp (using the MailChimp AddOn in the developer package), you can easily add mailing list subscription to any existing contact form you have. e.g. you could have a ‘Tick here to get the newsletter’ on your contact form, to saving having more than one contact form.
MailChimp does require a lot of work to get a nice looking signup form. Thankfully Gravity Forms removes that headache by making it really easy to make a neat-looking contact form.
6) Easy tweaking for non-techies
If you’re not technical, playing with code probably causes you some headaches! But if you’re not technical, you can easily create new forms, as well as tweak existing ones.
This works great for my clients who want to be able to adjust the information they collect at a later date. This gives them the peace of mind that they have control over their own website.
7) Easy migration of forms between websites
Just imagine, you’ve spent a few days (or even weeks) perfecting your website form. Now you want it on another website you have? Thanks to Gravity Forms, you can export and import any form to a new website running Gravity Forms. Clearly this saves you plenty of time, as well as minimising any copying errors that might creep in by forgetting an important detail.
8) Personalised email notifications
The email notifications (following a successful form submission) can be customised.
This means you can create personal acknowledgement emails to anyone who fills in one of your forms. This gives your website a more professional feel, and reassures the website visitor that their contact message was successfully received.
The fundamental benefit?
The overall benefit of Gravity Forms is that it saves you lots of time. If you’re not technical, then you get lots of capability for very little effort. Time is so short these days… why bother doing things the slow and painful way? Use Gravity Forms instead!
(Worthy note: No, I don’t work for Rocket Media, I’m just a big fan of their plugin!).
