How to Add Forms to Your Website Using Plugins

Hey everyone, it’s Sandi Leyva with Accelerator Digital Media. I want to show you how to add forms to your website using WordPress plugins. We really don’t recommend this. We really recommend that you use any other method, CRM, email marketing, Google forms, PDF. We really recommend you use one of these other methods, but if for some reason you’ve got to do it this way, then here are a couple of tips. We don’t recommend Contact Form 7, just really, really easily hacked. We do see a lot of people using Gravity Forms and here’s the pricing on that. So this is a WordPress plugin that you can use to add forms to your website that we do not support, but if you want to go in and do it yourself, you’re welcome to do this. You’ll need a subscription here. Gravity Forms is one that if you don’t keep updated, your site will get hacked. So it’s absolutely urgent that you keep the plugin updated for us.

The other one that we see a couple of other people using is Formidable Forms, and you can see the packages that they have available here. Again, stay away from Contact Form 7. It is just too common and it is really, really easy to get your site hacked if you use that. Now, I’m not going to really go into how to add a plugin, had to implement it, there’s going to be support software for whatever forms plugin you choose. But the thing is when you’re expecting to get email from a form, you’re going to be very, very, very disappointed unless you also implement email, email supplement, whatever you want to call it, software because the default for WordPress sending out emails is something that’s typically blocked and not supported on most hosting sites. You’ve got to override that with software, such as SendGrid or Amazon, we use AWS Amazon Web Services.

Now this is not the same as the Amazon that you buy retail from. Amazon has a whole separate section where they do B2B. And the services that you need to get… the way to sign into this and log in and sign up for it is aws.amazon.com. And you need the IAM for validation purposes. You need the Amazon SES, which is simple email service, and you can run your WordPress emails through Amazon and then they will be deliverable, better deliverability. So SendGrid’s a really common one and AWS is a really common one. But if you’re expecting to get email from forums or from any other part of your WordPress website, you’ve got to use these overrides.

Now it could also be that when we move you to a new server solution, your email may start working better and you may not need the additional things. Again, we don’t support any of this. All right, so you’ll need an IT person or you’ll need enough knowledge on your own in order to do this yourself. Again, it’s a fifth option. It’s an option that some people use. Again, we don’t recommend it. We don’t support it, but if you want to go play in that area and maybe you’ve got a lot of forms set up or something like that, then I did want to point you to these areas. All right, thanks everybody.