HappyForms – Top WordPress Form Builder for Free

Jul 18, 2018 | WordPress Plugins, WordPress Wednesday


Kori Ashton reviews HappyForms – which is a WordPress form builder that is completely free. It’s better (in Kori’s opinion) than ContactForm 7 and obviously less expensive than Gravity Forms. If you’d like to learn more about them visit.

Video Transcript

Hey y’all, welcome to another WordPress Wednesday, my name is Kori Ashton and you have found a video inside of a YouTube channel dedicated to all things WordPress. So if you’d like to, be sure to subscribe to my channel because every Wednesday, I’m creating a video just like this to help you improve your online marketing.

Another really great resource for you inside the world of WordPress is Pressable. These guys offer incredible secure WordPress hosting for your website and support so be sure to check them out if you’re looking for a solution like them. I’ll put a link to them in the description box below and tell them I sent you their way.

You guys, if you watch my channel, you know that I’m not a fan of contact form seven and I am, sorry you guys, but I am a fan of Gravity Forms but a lot of you have said you know what, Kori, I’m on a really small budget and I really need to be in the budget of free so get happy because I have found a solution that’s gonna make you happy.

happy-forms-logo

It is called HappyForms. You guys, this is the perfect WordPress builder for anybody on a budget and for that matter anybody who just wants a great solution because this is always, always, always free, there is no premium upgrade version. You get every bell and whistle in the free version. Why are they doing this? Because they love the WordPress community and they wanted to give you a solution in the budget of free, how kind is that? That’s why they named it HappyForms.

Form Example

I’m gonna show you an example of what these look like so you can get an idea, I mean even here you can see, it’s a drag and drop environment, it’s kind of a hybrid, it’s easier than contact form seven and it goes even further in allowing you to customize things that gravity forms doesn’t even let you do so here we go.

happy-forms-interface

Installation

I’m gonna take you step by step through it and let’s take a look at it, you’re gonna go into your plugins area and click add new. You’re gonna do a search for the keyword HappyForms, all together, one word, HappyForms. When you see that, this is the space, you wanna be sure that it’s been updated recently, that it’s compatible with your version of WordPress, of course, and that it’s got great stars to it, this is a great review so I’m gonna install now and I’m gonna click activate. Are you ready? If I go too quickly, just pause me, rewind, and you’ll be able to do this so easily and quickly.

Copy Sample Form To Clipboard

One of the cool things about HappyForms is that it actually gives you, over here on the left side now, it gives you a sample form that you can tinker with right away. As you hover over this, check out this nice little thoughtful feature they gave us, a little copy to clipboard. So if you hover over that shortcode and click that button, it’s gonna copy it onto your clipboard and you can go then and add a page, let’s say add new page, or a post for that matter, right, and we’re just gonna test things here, let’s do testing, and you can either paste from your clipboard or they’ve got this nice little handy button right here that you can choose your form and click insert and it will write the code for you, right?

So let’s preview this and just see in these moments here what I was able to do. There’s first name, last name, there’s a nice checklist here, there’s a nice drop-down option here, your message and submit form. Pretty cool, pretty straightforward, let’s see how they build it though because that’s the trick, how complicated are these to build out? And how much can you customize?

Let’s take a look at it, let’s click add new either here or on the left side, you can click add new. And it takes us into this pretty cool what you see is what you get type of environment, it allows you to see the form being built here on the right side, these are the available fields all the way down here that you’re able to kind of click on and implement inside of here and be sure to just look and read the instructions, don’t go blindly past a section that gives you really great insightful instructions.

Testing Form

The first thing we’re gonna do is we’re gonna test the form, name the form testing, testing form and then we’re gonna go ahead and start just applying some of these fields so you can see how simple it is to do. I’m gonna go ahead and just put the usual your name field and all I did was click on that available field and it’s allowing me to just fill in the blank. And I’m gonna do this, you can put it on the left side of the field, you can put it on the right side of the field below, let’s see below it, there you go.

I think if my screen were a little bit bigger, it would have jumped on that left side. Let’s put it as a display holder here. I kind of like that because then it kind of goes into that section and of course it allows you to require the field, there you go, we’ll close that up and let’s go ahead and do an email field, right, so that’s pretty common and we’ll say your email and this is a required field and for consistency, we’re gonna say it’s a placeholder, I love it. You can say we can apply that to all parts if you want to, that’s a nice little cheater feature, I love it. And for the sake of just this right now, let’s go ahead and add in, oh! I don’t know, let’s do, how ’bout, what if we do a phone number, I think that’s kind of important at times, there you go, placeholder, love it, and then, here we go, check this out, I’m gonna do the message area, this is that long text and I’m gonna say your message, dah dah dah, and put it inside the placeholder.

All right, I feel pretty confident about this. This is looking pretty good but it’s gonna allow us to go even further and really customize the heck out of this thing so hold on to your hats, here we go, I’m gonna click next.

It allows us to immediately address the confirmation message right here of what’s being said as soon as somebody clicks submit. The email that goes out to the admin or whatever email address you put here, whoever needs to receive the alert that we’ve had a form filled out and then it allows you to go ahead and put in all the information of what goes to the individual, right?

On the complete redirect, so if you want them to transition from this form to a landing page when they’re done, you can actually put that URL here if you wanted to and if you’d like, you can change what the button even says on this. So we can say register now. There you go.

Honeypot for Anti-Spam

Another really cool feature that I love about this is you don’t have to use a CAPTCHA for anti-spam, you can actually use a honeypot, which I highly recommend and it’s a cool feature inside of gravity forms. They operate here, I’m telling you this is a hybrid on the budget of free, super, super cool solution. I’m gonna go ahead and click next.

Customize

Now, this is where you get to have a lot of fun and customize the heck out of this form. You guys, this is amazing, look at this, you can adjust the form width. You cannot do this with gravity forms unless you add on another plugin or you know how to do CSS, add a div class around it and actually write code. They’re allowing you to do this in a drag and drop environment, aah!, it’s so cool.

Here are your primary colors so you can change all those things around really easily and quickly. So I’ve got those set, I’m gonna go back and I’m gonna do my form title, do I want to show it? No, I think I’m gonna hide it.

How Does it Sit on Page

This is another really cool feature that I’ve had people ask me how do you do this for anything to do with how it would sit on the page, that’s how you do it right here.

Adjust Font Size/Color & Border

You can adjust the font size as well. That’s super easy to do. Keep on-goin’. Here you go, here’s the border, do we not want to have the border in there? Of course, we do, we like the boundaries, we like it to look like a form field. You can have ’em be more narrow padding, I kind of like that idea, kind of zips it up a little bit. There’s your border color if you wanted to try to match your website or something along those lines. So a lot of available really cool fields there. And of course, the submit button again. If you wanna just have a nice big font size, you can. You can change the background color if you want to with it. You can change the text color. There’s so much customization inside of this. You can center it in the middle of the form, I love that, aah!, it’s so cool. When you’re done, we’re gonna click save the form.

Add to Site

This is incredible, are you excited? ‘Cause I’m gonna show you now, we’ve got it here on the copy to clipboard, let’s go back over here now to our page, I’m gonna paste in the new HappyForms shortcode, click preview and go over to my landing page, there’s our new form. In just these few minutes, you guys. I’m gonna fill it out here, KoriAshton@gmail.com, phone number… 8-6-7-5-3, I’m kidding, okay. This rocks. Makes me happy, register now, okay, your message was successfully sent, we appreciate you contacting us and we’ll be in touch shortly.

Message Customization

Remember, that message we can completely change if we want to, the color of the outline, we can completely change if you want to but I actually just heard my phone go off that I just received that notification.

View Response on Dashboard

All right, here’s the icing on the cake. If that wasn’t enough, these guys thought of everything. They’re allowing you to also have the responses or the entries of every form live here inside of your website. So let’s say something happens or breaks with your email address and you’re not able to access your email. If somebody fills out this form, they still live here inside of your database. So you can come here to responses. Click on that, you see actually we have an alert that we have one new one. You come here and you can see which form they filled out. I can click on edit, go in and see immediately the message that was sent to me. Oh! these guys thought of everything, it makes me so happy and it should make you happy that it’s in the budget of free.

If you guys use HappyForms, will you put that in the description box below? And please tweet to them, let them know that you saw this video and how happy you are that they have this free solution for you. I hope you’re having a great WordPress Wednesday. I’ll see ya next time. Bye, y’all.

 

Bonus Video Added:

Here’s another video on how to Make Columns in HappyForms >>