156 - WordPress forms is a crowded space, so we launched WPForms

Interview - WordPress forms is a crowded space, so we launched WPForms

Some things are universal. Something about death and taxes. Another universal is that you will put some kind of contact form on every site that you build. You will though, won't you?

With that in mind, developers have been busying working out ways to make WordPress forms as easy as possible. We've got heaps of possible options and some of them have been around for a long time. Over time, more and more WordPress form options have cropped up, and there are dozens to choose from.

So if you were a developer and wanted to get into the WordPress plugin marketplace, the last thing that you'd want to do is create a product in a area that has dozens of rivals already. That would be silly...

Unless you are Jared Atchison that is... because he decided to do just that. He looked around and the WordPress forms landscape and thought that there was room for one more, and so WPForms was born.

You see each plugin does things slightly differently. You have options to do this, but not that. Fields that you have available in one plugin are not available in another.

Then there's the whole process of actually creating the form, and this is where WPForms like to plant their flag in the sand and say - we do this really well.

WPForms took a look at the multitude of WordPress forms and thought that an area that needed to be improved was how quickly you could go from no form, to a finished - up on the website - form. They wanted that to be faster, much faster. So they created a solution which enables you to click a button a few times... pick from a raft of typical form templates and then get on with something else!

Now let's think about the audience here for a minute. If you are reading this then I'm going to make the bold claim that you are not the typical user of WordPress. You are likely the typical power user, or developer, but most people who use WordPress have no idea how it works under the hood, and they have no interest in ever knowing. Millions of WordPress users just want to login, create content, hit publish then logout. That's all they need.

They have no interest in learning the vagaries of how to build a form. They just want a form... now! So WPForms gives then that. Login, pick a template for a form that you know is built for what you need, put it somewhere, logout.

So that's the WPForms UVP - "a WordPress Forms Plugin that's Easy and Powerful". And they back this up with a test to make sure that you can do it all in less time than it takes to boil an egg!

Jared is on the podcast today to talk about what WPForms might be able to do for you. To get you to take a look and see if there's anything in there that might make it your default WordPress forms plugin of choice.

We talk about how the whole plugin got off the ground with Syed Balkhi, the founder of WP Beginner, and how this is not just a plugin built for fast form creation. We talk about some of the powerful features that the plugin makes available to you too... you know all of the features that the other plugins have, plus a few others that they don't, such as 'conversational forms'.

It's a great product from an engaged team with a good looking roadmap. So take a listen to the episode and let us know in the comments what you think...

Mentioned in this episode:

If you're reading this before 2nd December 2019, you can get WPForms on a Black Friday Deal. If not, you can go to the WPForms site anyway.