Being one of the best-selling Envato WordPress form builder plugins, ARForms has been providing ongoing support and development for more than five years already.
So if you are looking for an affordable and powerful contact form plugin for WordPress, this guide will shed light on how this popular tool works and what it has on offer today. Hopefully, it'll help you in your search for the best WordPress form builder plugin.
In broad strokes, the ARForms plugin enables you to create unlimited forms of different sorts ranging from a very simple inquiry form on your blog to really complex ones like marketing or insurance claim forms that are ready to take online payments and improve your marketing efforts.
But there are tons of such purpose-built plugins; can this one be your point of interest? We can't answer for sure, but we have a few good directions in mind. So...
Before we take a deeper dive, we'd like to share a few reasons why you might be interested in resorting to this particular WordPress form builder. The backend test-runs allowed us to define a few scenarios in which this plugin can perform best, so you can make your own assessments right away:
- ARForms is foremost suitable for non-tech people because its interface is extremely straightforward and user-friendly.
- The plugin will be a good choice if you want to ditch a heavy WordPress contact form plugin that kills your website performance and wish to switch to a more lightweight solution.
- It's a worthy thing if you are looking to create really complex WordPress forms without coding skills, since the plugin is packed with the impressive editing and styling opportunities.
- You don't want to fuss with adding each and every contact form field but rather need a pretty WordPress contact form template that will work out of the box.
- If you have a specific list of integrations and functionalities you need to wire up, it's unlikely you won't be able to do it with ARForms.
- You need a rather one-stop all-in-one solution for all types of traditional forms and pop-up forms for marketing and blogging purposes.
If this all sounds like you, then feel free to learn the details in our ARForms review and hands-on guide! We've tried to make it an organized, to-the-point list.
ARForms Review 2019: Is It Worth The Hype?? (Read Truth)
Unlike many other WordPress form builder plugins, ARForms comes with its extremely easy-to-use custom builder, which ships with a toolkit that encompasses:
- Several most commonly used form templates you can employ right off the bat.
- All the range of the form elements - up to 30 default form fields, including the advanced ones, such as radio buttons, sections, date, star rating, etc.
- Drag-and-drop field manipulation. That means you can add the fields, drag the fields around for the needed order, duplicate and resize them easily.
There are specific options about each field you can edit - they depend on the type of field. For example, for simple fields, you can just add a description, tooltip, mandatory mark, placeholder text, and other helpful information. Some fields offer validation settings, icons, width modifications, and more control.
We won't stop on each field, but if you dig deeper yourself, you'll find lots of useful things aimed at improving the user interface of your forms, thus, increasing the form submission and conversion rates.
For example, you won't find it difficult to split long forms into the shorter semantic steps by employing a page break form field (e.g. it can be a helping tactic for long marketing-oriented forms).
Unlike many other solutions, ARForms lets you use custom images for radio buttons, so if you plan on creating a multi-dimensional survey, for example, it's going to be a breeze!
- Inline form editing (update field titles and texts right in the editor).
- Manually resizable form width and fields size - in case you need a custom look to fit a particular website layout.
On top of that, there is one more absolutely awesome thing that we reckon beats the competitors. It's a huge collection of the ready-to-go designer-crafted templates for all types of contact forms, which are created inconsistent with the best form design practices. You just pick one, adjust to your needs and voila - your own stylish form is published!
Modify form colors, shapes, alignments, typography and more in the visual style builder
ARForms comes with a fully-featured style builder that is very easy to play with for non-techies. At the touch of the buttons, you can tweak the overall form style (material, rounded or standard), colors, field sizes, labels, go deeper into styling typography, etc.
If you are familiar with CSS, you can add your own CSS via the appropriate screen - a pretty handy thing for developers who create websites for clients.
In the Advanced form customization options screen you can approach the alignments, form border settings, modify field inputs and customize the tiniest details of the submission button.
Furthermore, ARForms offers out-of-the-box responsive forms that are automatically resized to fit the screen of the device, which you can preview right in the editor.
As you might see, the plugin will unlikely require a steep learning curve from you-you learn literally on the go watching the changes you apply in real time.
Built-in pop-up WordPress forms at no extra cost
No matter which type of website you are running, you can't get along without some calls-to-action. Pop-up forms can be just those incentives - and they come with the ARForms bundle. To optimize them, that is, to use wisely and not annoy people, the plugin gives you a choice of pop-up shapes:
...and a set of effective behaviors:
- Time-delay triggers to draw the attention of only those who are really interested in your content
- Click-to-open discreet triggers
- Exit-intent triggers
- Auto-open triggers at the time of the page load
- On-scroll triggers
So it's all there in one plugin.
Conditional logic and math form logic
Conditional logic is a commodity for the WordPress form builder plugins, but not every alternative plugin will give you it for free.
ARForms supplies you with all the necessary tools to take advantage of this must-have functionality in a straightforward way - and free of charge. The settings for these options are available on the field level through the form editor screen, so you can quickly apply the rules to the chosen fields.
In the first place, conditional logic allows for setting up rules that define whether to display or hide the fields based on the data of the previously submitted fields. This way you optimize forms for each particular client building up interaction according to user preferences. You can add multiple conditional rules combining 'else' and 'if' statements for advanced forms. It's also possible to set custom values and enable or disable the preferable fields. You can go very deeply by combining different conditional logic rules.
If you need to allow the form fields to handle calculations right when filling it in, for example, to calculate charges, the solution for math calculations is integrated with ARFroms. It plays well with the plugin add-ons related to all sorts of calculations.
For example, using the standard "HTML" ARForms field, you can enable automatic calculations for specific fields - let's say, you want to give people an option to choose the service charge, plus add an obligatory fee. So you basically need to add the set of fields which will to be included into the formula, of course, with the needed values (it works through enabling "Running Total" via the field settings).
When you need to charge this exact amount online, you'll need to wire up that initial total calculations "HTML" form field to the preferable payment add-on (e.g. ) via the add-on settings by selecting the needed options:
A little bit of hassle, but it works without extra tools!
You can surely do that for any sort of calculations even without online charges.
Form actions upon submission
So what else can you do apart from sending email notifications after the form is submitted by the user? We're pretty sure the library of form actions will suit the needs of even the most tricky scenarios:
- Traditionally display a successful message.
- Redirect to external pages (thanks to the conditional submission feature, you can even apply conditional URL redirects).
- Display specific content from your website pages.
- Send data to the internal server to the custom URL.
- Apply more conditional submission rules.
Again, you don't need to go back and forth through the admin dashboard, you'll be able to set it up right in the editor.
Forms entries management
You can track and analyze the data you receive through your forms, so you are not left in the dark on how you're performing: you can create detailed analytics reports showing a number of entries and view info for a chosen time frame and for a particular form.
As a matter of routine, you can work with the submissions by easily filtering all entries by dates and forms. You may also edit, delete, duplicate, import and export information in a CSV format.
Extensions for any purpose: direct payment gateways, online signature, digital downloads and more
Need to accept payments safely through your WordPress website forms? Through the particular add-on, you can hook up the needed gateways, such as PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.Net, etc. You can also go with the Mollie add-on, which is crucial for websites that work with region-specific payment gateways.
To power up your forms at any other level, you can make use of the User Signup, PDF Creator, Infusionsoft CRM connection (on its way so far), Google Sheets integration, SMS notifications, Post Creator extensions and more. For example, here is how far you can go in creating PDF templates:
Such add-ons as Google reCAPTCHA for spam protection and Active Campaign to automate email marketing are available for free download.
Integrations for easy email marketing
Do you have a favorite email marketing automation service? You'll unlike the need to change your preferences since the ARForms plugin has a wide variety of services that are ready to be connected for free: MailChimp, Aweber, GetResponse, Madmimi, Ebizac.com, Contact, Active Campaign, MailerLite, Constant Contact, and GVO.
If you need more options, you'll also find MailPoet and Mailster available as premium opt-in integrations. What's more, the plugin also allows for conditional logic for subscriptions!
Anything else?
There are tons of other features you'll most likely be able to discover only when you give the plugin a go. But we think there are some more prominent things that are worth mentioning now:
- Autosave form progress that helps improve the overall UX and retain users.
- You can easily import and export from across domains.
- Invisible spam protection in addition to the optional free reCAPTCHA.
- Works for widgetized areas of your WordPress theme.
- You can track user actions with the Google Analytics script.
- In addition to WPBakery, Cornerstone and Elementor utmost compatibility, the plugin is also Gutenberg-ready, so you'll be able to add the ARForms block with your custom settings to any page via Gutenberg editor.
- Feel free to embed third-party media files (e.g. YouTube, Google Maps) into your forms.
- A built-in mechanism to prevent suspicious duplicate form entries.
- It comes with a great capability of pre-populating the form fields with common data (e.g. location) to simplify the whole process for users.
- Access to actions and filters for developers.
Of course, there are much more things this plugin is capable of than we had the chance to mention in this article.
Run a free test-drive of the backend settings and premium extensions
We hope that our ARForms review and guide will be of good help for getting a general idea of the plugin, but you definitely want to try it first-hand by creating a risk-free plugin sandbox to see whether it measures up to your expectations.
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Conclusion: Is ARForms a better solution for your next project?
The obvious answer is: it depends on what particular problems you want to solve with your forms. Of course, there is no single WordPress form creator that can meet 100% of your needs.
But if you need something for creating traditional contact forms on WordPress and looking for more design and option flexibility, a more user-friendly interface and a quality plugin solution in general, ARForms has it all. If you require a particular custom, complex cog, you need to thoroughly go through the list of features to learn more.
Overall, with years of polishing and producing new features for the WordPress form building needs, ARForms beats the competitors at multiple aspects:
- The feature set is massive - it's an affordable and generous premium plugin containing all the must-have tools ($38 is the price of a core premium plugin).
- The advanced style customization settings panel is one of the most prominent features of this contact form WordPress plugin since it literally gives users flexibility only designers and developers can provide.
- It enables you to build lightweight (loaded in a blink of an eye), good-looking and extendable forms.
So does the ARForms plugin tick all your boxes? We are keen to learn more from your real needs related to creating contact forms with WordPress, so please do share your questions and thoughts in comments.