First and foremost, it’s important to say that we have no affiliation to Formidable Forms. We use the Pro version of this plugin in all of our builds because we truly believe in the product.

With that being said, WordPress websites are on the rise (not the Skynet kind of rise – you are not the resistance) and form plugins are on the rise too. With many options available to you at varying price points, with the likes of Contact Form 7 (CF7), Ninja Forms, and WPForms, it’s easy to get lost in the WordPress Plugin marketplace. Today we’re going to be talking about one of the best (in our opinion) form builder plugins and why it’s the one we choose for all of our website builds.

Whether you need a simple contact form on your website or a more complicated one like the form we built for Corporate Event Centre See our case study on Corporate Event Centre , the Formidable Forms Pro plugin is the best solution. In this post, we’ll be outlining what Formidable Forms is and its key features to help your website advance to the next level.

What Is Formidable Forms?

Formidable Forms is a WordPress forms plugin that allows developers of all levels to build simple contact forms or more complicated, multi-stage forms on WordPress websites. It hosts a wide array of features like conditional logic, repeater fields, calculations, accessibility, and a whole lot more. Formidable Forms surpasses all other forms due to its customizability, amazing support staff, and 3rd party integrations.

Why Is Formidable Forms Important?

We didn’t intend for this to be a “list-style” post but it turned out that way, so here’s a small list of 6 features we love about Formidable Forms! Some of these features are only included in the Pro version but we have that, which is why we’re talking about it.

1. Drag & Drop Form Builder

Formidable Forms comes out-of-the-box with simplicity in mind. You can easily drag and drop form fields without knowing HTML or CSS. It allows us (and any developer) to create reliable forms on the fly while following best practices set by the team at Formidable Forms. You don’t have to be a developer to use this intuitive plugin.

2. Repeater Fields

I repeat, Repeater Fields! This feature allows us to make dynamic forms that give users the ability to add entire fields, or submissions to a form. We can easily create complicated forms without having to burden users with seeing a gigantic form on first glance. User experience is at the forefront of the genius minds behind Formidable Forms, and the repeater fields feature is incredibly useful when building longer, more complicated forms.

3. Calculations

1+1 = 2 right? But how do you do that in a form on a website? Does it seem like rocket science? Not really, they’ve thought of that too! Formidable Forms allows you to add calculation fields to your forms so you can create powerful forms that allow for simple or complicated calculations. As a bonus, you can integrate your calculations with payment gateways like PayPal or Stripe to automate payment of whatever it is you’re calculating. You’ll see below that you can get users to input “how long is your yard” and “how wide is your yard” and it outputs the “total square yards” for your user automatically. Magic before our eyes! No sleight of hand or illusions here, just a wicked feature built-in.

4. Interactive Fields

Interactive Fields, which Formidable Forms calls “Cascading Lookup Fields” are fields that allow other dependant fields to render a list of values based on the previously selected field. Ok, that sounded complicated. In the example below, you can see a list of states and based on the selection “California” the age dropdown populates with age groups and then a price is outputted based on these 2 selections. Let your imagination run wild, the possibilities are endless!

5. Form Submission Management

Let’s say your form is working well and your users are actually using your form and submitting through your website. Where other form builder plugins fall short, Formidable Forms rises to the occasion, with a built-in Entry Management feature in the backend of your WordPress website. You can go in, view all entries, search, export, edit, delete, and sort any and all entries that come in through your forms. This helps when you’re running a bigger website with multiple forms and only want to see the entries in specific forms.

For example, let’s say you’re running a contest and want to export just the contest form submissions, well you can do just that pretty easily! Did I mention setting it up is a breeze too?

6. Customizability & Flexibility

Not only does Formidable Forms make itself user-friendly and easy-to-use for beginners, but it lends itself to developers as well. From a developer perspective, if one of the out-of-box templates or features isn’t playing well with what you want, you can scrap it and build whatever you want from scratch. This has helped my team in more than one scenario and we’ve gone ahead to build whatever form we’d like! If your developer is struggling with a form builder plugin, Formidable Forms is the saving grace.

Takeaway

Even though we don’t take ourselves too seriously, we do take our builds seriously. It’s why we offer Formidable Forms Pro (premium paid version) in all of our builds. It makes building simple and complex forms possible, and their support staff is incredibly responsive when helping us navigate through developmental hurdles. Formidable Forms takes into account the best web practices and accessibility just like we do, and we can rely on their product. You can read about how we build it right How we build our websites right and how we opt for quality code in all of our builds.