Form Designer

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

Go to Plugins, open the Forms & Leads group, and click Form Designer.

Form Designer or Feedback?

Some websites also have Feedback. It builds forms too, and does more: each form gets its own web page, it can be kept to signed-in customers, and it has analytics. The two do not share forms or replies.

Both add a block called Form. The Form Designer one says Embed a form under its name. If you have both, build new forms in Feedback.

Want a customer to book a time with you? That is the Bookings add-on, not a form.

Your forms

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 “Warranty claim”. 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.

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.

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 and find Conditional visibility. It says Always shown. until you add a rule. Click + Add condition, then 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.

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. Click Publish changes, then Publish changes again in the box that opens.

Pages covers blocks in full, and saving and publishing covers that last step.

A form can also open in a popup, with no page needed. See Popups.

Who hears about a reply

Open the form and click Notifications near the bottom.

One address per line, or separated by commas.

Notification recipients are the addresses told about every reply. They belong to this form alone. They are not the alerts set in Notifications, and changing one does not change the other.

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.

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.

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.

The list shows every reply that matches your filters, however many there are. An export holds them all too.

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.

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 does not do this.