I am a WordPress Designer with over 7 years experience and my first choice was Contact Form 7. Many of my peers were telling me I need to start using this extensible plugin but I had been using Contact Form 7 for so long I did not give Gravity Forms much thought. Then I found an offer code online and figured, “What the heck, I’ll give it a try!” It took less then 10 minutes and I was hooked! Any WordPress designer can work with the standard features that come with a free plug-in such as Contact Forms 7. An exceptional WordPress designer, however, recognizes a true investment in Gravity Forms, a premium plug-in with advanced features and expandability. Its customizability and superior range of options are essential to any innovative web designer. Here, we will explore, in-depth, the clearly identifiable reasons you should be using Gravity Forms over Contact Forms 7.

EASE OF USE

Any claim Contact Forms 7 can make in terms of being easy to use is based solely on its built-in, stock form. In order to arrange the form and how it’s presented, basic HTML and some experimentation with the formatting is required. Gravity Forms is drag and drop, which makes it much easier to use. Adding fields to the form or changing their order is simply a matter of dragging and dropping into place. That kind of maneuverability lends itself to a greater degree of customizations. A default form is not needed. Creating new forms should be no problem for any competent WordPress designer.

BEYOND CONTACT FORMS

Once we move past Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms is the clear winner. The ability of your visitors to interact with your site is crucial. With Gravity Forms entry level personal license, WordPress designers can create front end submission forms, allowing visitors to submit guest blogs or online applications. Beyond the standard and advanced group of fields, which can be mixed and matched to build multi-page forms, Gravity has a whole set of pricing fields, which adds the ability to accept orders and bookings online.

OTHER FEATURES

In terms of ‘bang for your buck’, there are still more added bonuses contained within that entry level personal license. Once those forms are created and those fields added, a WordPress designer can rely on Gravity’s conditional logic to tailor forms to individuals. It does this by showing or hiding fields based on previous selections and effectively provides the designer with what he or she needs while sparing visitors any confusion over unnecessary fields. WordPress designers can easily store all information derived from form submissions in their database, making it highly accessible and easy to export for use outside of WordPress.

EXTENSIONS & ADD-ONS

Any of the top WordPress plugins can be judged based on the access WordPress designers have to in-house or third party add-ons, and Gravity Forms is no exception. While this is where entry-level users exit the picture, business users have access to four basic add-ons and top level developer license holders have eighteen. The payment gateway add-ons alone go a long way in terms of using pricing fields to accept orders and process payments. Aside from what they do for functionality within Gravity Forms, these add-ons make possible a wide range of integrations with other tools and services.

ERROR HANDLING

Even the most expert WordPress designer will make mistakes and while any plug-in can issue an error notification, Gravity Forms steps up by including more field types, some with their own ability to handle errors. It simply can check the entry of more fields on a form. Its error messages are even more helpful.

GRAVITY FORMS WINS!

A WordPress designer is just that, a designer. In design, there is craft and there is expression. The designer’s services should always allow for maximum expression of the client’s unique identity. That is why the appeal of a plug-in like Gravity is as indisputable as the law of physics it was named after.