Using Google Forms and Embedding in WordPress
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WordPress has a breadth of plugins that help you add forms to your web presence, and we usually love to talk about our favorite plugins for any use case. However, Google Forms are just as popular and prevalent all over the Internet as WordPress, and when looking to add forms to your WordPress website, it makes sense to bring in a system like Google Forms that you’re used to and can handle with ease.
Why Google Forms?
Google Forms is the go-to solution for anyone interested in creating registration forms, survey questionnaires or just plain quizzes, or even tests for students, especially in a COVID-19 world. It is a part of the Google Suite of applications and lets you customize your form any way you’d like – with a whole lot of addons, customization, the ability to add media and to collect and view responses in real-time.
Once we integrate it with WordPress, a single form can be reproduced across any number of WordPress websites, mailing lists or social media and the responses will be aggregated for you, unifying the whole process.
Integrating Google Forms into WordPress
As per usual, we have both the plugin and non-plugin ways of achieving this integration. Let’s see how to go about doing this:
Step 1: Create and design the Form
To get started, log in on your Google Drive account, and pick Google Forms from the menu of apps. Choose the colors, font size and theme that you’d like so that when you embed the form it fits in perfectly with the rest of your WordPress site.
Step 2: Get the iFrame code from Google Forms
The simplest way to integrate your newly created Google Form in WordPress is to embed the iframe code of the Form directly in the WordPress site.
How do we do this? At the top right of your Google Forms screen, you’ll see ‘Send’, and clicking on it will bring up a ‘Send Form’ screen that lets you choose how to send the form. Select the ‘Embed HTML’ option (that looks like < >) and copy the code for the iframe
Step 3: Insert the code in WordPress
Log on to your WordPress website next, and locate the right page and position that you’d like for the Form. Open the HTML editor, paste in the previously copied iframe code, save the content draft and preview it to make sure it’s just the way you want it.
The Google Forms WordPress plugin
This plugin – Google Forms WordPress – lets you use a lot of extensive options and elevate the visitor’s experience with your Form. You can access and control the following settings to really tweak your Google Forms to your liking:
- Columns. Form responses can be split into columns, up to a maximum of 10.
- Captcha. Banish spam responses and response bots by including a CAPTCHA in the form
- Email. An option to notify you via email when a response has been submitted
- Prefix. A way to style the 20+ CSS classes that are used by Google Forms, by adding a prefix to every class name.
To integrate your forms with this plugin, you can either ‘Add New Google Form’ right at the admin page or choose a previously saved Form from Google Drive. For the second option, you’ll need the form’s link for the ‘Form URL’ field, and in general, you’d do well to fill in the ‘Confirmation URL’ as well for your Form.
And that’s about it: Your Form is ready for the big leagues – meaning WordPress; so until next time, stay safe, informed and be WordPress-ing!
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