# Form Designer

If you do not see this in your menu, your website does not use it.

Form Designer comes with our higher plans. Contact us to upgrade, or visit your
customer portal for a self-service upgrade to a supported plan.

Form Designer lets you build your own forms. A booking request, a survey, a
sign-up sheet. You build it, and you read the replies, without asking anyone
for help.

Go to **Plugins**, then **Form Designer**.

:::note[Important]
Your contact form and your quote form are not built here. Those two came with
your website, and their inquiries land in [Leads](/plugins/leads/).

Forms you build here are separate. Their replies land under **Submissions**,
covered further down this page. Nothing you do on this screen can change your
contact form.
:::

## Your forms

![The Form Designer screen with one form named Booking request. Four numbered marks: 1 on the blue New form button, 2 on Edit, 3 on Submissions, 4 on the red Delete button.](../../../assets/screenshots/form-designer-list.png)

*One row per form. The gray line under the name is its web name, whether it is
live, and how many boxes it has.*

**1. + New form.** Starts a new one.

**2. Edit.** Opens the form to change it.

**3. Submissions.** The replies people have sent.

**4. Delete.** Read the warning at the bottom of this page first.

Two more buttons sit on the row. **Duplicate** makes a copy you can change
without touching the first one. **Pause** stops the form taking replies, and
turns into **Activate** to switch it back on.

## Building a form

Click **+ New form**. Type a **Form name**, such as "Booking request". The
**Slug** fills itself in. That is the short web name, and lower case letters,
numbers and hyphens are all it takes.

Click **Create form**. You get a form with one text box in it, because a form
with nothing in it would be no use.

![The form editor. A Form name and Slug box, then five field rows, then a Save changes button. Four numbered marks: 1 on a field row, 2 on the down arrow, 3 on the small x, 4 on the Add field button.](../../../assets/screenshots/form-designer-fields.png)

*Five boxes, in the order a visitor fills them in.*

**1. A field.** One row is one box on your form. Click the row to open its
settings.

**2. The arrows.** Move the box up or down the form.

**3. The x.** Takes the box off the form. The last one cannot be removed.

**4. + Add field.** Pick a kind in the box to its left, then click. Text,
email, phone, a date, a dropdown, a file upload and more.

Click **Save changes** at the bottom when you are done. Nothing you have
changed reaches your website until you do.

### What you can set on a box

Click a field row to open it.

| Setting | What it does |
| --- | --- |
| **Label** | What the visitor reads above the box. |
| **Name** | The inside name. See the warning below. |
| **Placeholder** | Faint example text inside the box. |
| **Help text** | A short line under the box. |
| **Default value** | What the box starts out holding. |
| **Required** | The visitor cannot send the form until this box is filled in. |
| **Width** | Full width, or half so two boxes sit side by side. |

:::caution[Warning]
**Label** is the wording. Change it whenever you like.

**Name** is not wording. It is how the answer is filed. Change it and every
reply you have already had shows that answer as belonging to a box that is no
longer there. Rules that point at this box are updated for you, but nothing
else is.

Change the label. Leave the name alone.
:::

:::caution[Warning]
Turning **Required** on for a box people often leave empty costs you inquiries.
They will not go back and fill it in. They will close the tab.

Ask for what you need to call someone back. Everything else can wait until you
have them on the phone.
:::

### Rules for what people can type

Open a box and you get a **Validation** part. It only offers what makes sense
for that kind of box. A number box offers a smallest and a largest value. A
text box offers a shortest and a longest. A file box offers which kinds of file
you take, and how big they can be.

There is also a **Pattern** box. If you do not know what a pattern is, leave it
empty. The form works perfectly well without one.

## Showing a box only sometimes

Some questions only matter after an earlier answer. Ask whether someone is a
business or a private customer, and only show **Company name** to the ones who
said business.

Open the box you want to hide, find **Conditional visibility**, and set the
rule:

> Show when **What do you need?** is **A repair**

The rule can only point at a box that comes **earlier** in the form. A later
answer does not exist yet when the form has to decide.

If that earlier box is a dropdown or a set of choices, you pick the answer from
a list instead of typing it. Typing it by hand is easy to get subtly wrong, and
the rule would then never match.

:::note[Important]
Rename a box and any rules pointing at it are fixed for you. Form Designer
tells you how many it changed.

Remove a box that other boxes depend on and it warns you first, and names them.
:::

## Putting the form on your website

A form shows nowhere until you add it to a page.

1. Open the page under **Content**, then **Pages**.
2. Type `/form` and choose **Form**.
3. Pick your form in the **Form** box.
4. Save the page, then publish it.

[Pages](/content/pages/) covers blocks in full, and [saving and
publishing](/start-here/saving-and-publishing/) covers that last step.

## Who hears about a reply

Open the form and click **Notifications** near the bottom.

![The Notifications part of the form editor. A Notification recipients box holding one email address, a checkbox reading Send one daily digest instead of per-submission emails, a Digest hour box reading 9, and a Webhook URL box.](../../../assets/screenshots/form-designer-notifications.png)

*One address per line, or separated by commas.*

**Notification recipients** are the addresses told about every reply.

**Send one daily digest instead of per-submission emails** swaps that for one
summary a day, at the hour you set in **Digest hour**. Good for a busy form.

**Webhook URL** is for joining your form to another system. Leave it empty
unless somebody has given you a web address to put in it.

Webhooks are best effort. If the other system is down, that reply is not sent
again. Email is the dependable route.

### Sending a receipt to the person who wrote in

A receipt is a short automatic reply to whoever filled in your form. Read both
warnings before you switch one on.

:::caution[Warning]
A receipt is sent to whatever address was typed into the form. With spam
protection off, a robot can make your website email a stranger, over and over.
That can end with your website being blocked from sending email at all.

**Spam protection** is under **Form settings**. Leave it on **Honeypot**, which
is how it starts, or on **Turnstile**. Never set it to **None** while a receipt
is switched on. Form Designer warns you if you do.
:::

:::caution[Warning]
The receipt goes to the first **email** box on your form. If your form does not
ask for an email address, there is nowhere to send it and nothing goes out.
Form Designer tells you when that is the case.

The body is plain text. Pasted formatting does not carry over.
:::

Click **After submission**. Fill in an **Autoresponder subject** and an
**Autoresponder body**, and the sender gets the reply.

### The rest of Form settings

**Confirmation message** is what a visitor reads once they have sent the form.
**Submit button label** is the wording on the button itself.

**Redirect URL** sends them to another page instead of showing the message.
Leave it empty unless you have a thank-you page.

**Retention (days)** is how long replies are kept. Zero means forever.

:::caution[Warning]
**Retention (days)** throws replies away on a timer, and they do not come back.
Set it to 30 and a reply from five weeks ago is gone.

Leave it at zero unless somebody has asked you to change it.
:::

## Reading the replies

Click **Submissions** on the form's row.

Replies are listed newest first. Click one to read every answer. From there you
can:

- **Star** it, to pick it out later
- **Mark read** or **Mark unread**
- **Archive** it, which clears it out of the way without deleting it
- write **Notes**, then click **Save note**. Notes are private
- **Delete** it, which cannot be undone

The **Status** box filters by **All**, **New**, **Read** or **Archived**. Check
**Starred only** to see just the starred ones.

**Submission details** at the bottom of a reply holds the sender's address on
the internet, their browser and their country. Useful for spotting a nuisance.

### Downloading them

**Export CSV** saves a file that opens in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets.
**Export JSON** is for handing to another system.

An export always holds **every** reply matching your **Status** filter, not
just the ones on screen.

:::note[Important]
The list shows the most recent 100 replies. Older ones are not lost. They are
still stored, and they are all in an export.

This is a limit in the forms system underneath, not a setting we can change.
Export is the way to see everything.
:::

### Old answers to questions you have changed

Rename or remove a box, and replies that came in beforehand still hold the
original answer. Those show up marked *"field no longer on form"*.

The answer is real. It just does not line up with the form as it stands today.
Nothing is lost.

## Pausing and deleting a form

**Pause** stops the form taking new replies. The replies you already have stay
where they are. Click **Activate** to switch it back on.

:::caution[Warning]
**Delete** removes the form and every reply it ever took. Nothing can bring
them back, and neither can we.

Any page with that form on it is left with an empty space where the form was.

Export your replies first, then take the block off those pages, then delete.
:::

## Things worth knowing

- **Only administrators can build forms.** An editor account cannot open this
  screen at all. If somebody needs to build forms, they need an administrator
  account.
- **Every reply records the sender's address on the internet, their browser and
  their country.** [Leads](/plugins/leads/) does not do this.

:::danger[Contact support]
Changing wording on a form is safe. Anything past that is worth a message
first.

Contact us before you:

- change a box's **Name**
- remove a box, or a whole form
- change **Spam protection** or **Retention (days)**
- put a web address in **Webhook URL**

A form that stops working stops quietly. Nobody complains. The inquiries simply
never arrive, and you find out weeks later.

Email [support@lookoutridgeit.com](mailto:support@lookoutridgeit.com).
[Getting support](/help/getting-support/) says what to put in the message.
:::